


Of Being the Tenders of Gardens

by shaenie



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2019-01-23 15:16:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 84,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12510272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaenie/pseuds/shaenie
Summary: It's Adam Ronan takes to what he thinks might be a remnant of Cabeswater first.





	Of Being the Tenders of Gardens

It’s Adam that Ronan takes to Cabeswater first. Once upon a time, it would have been Gansey, but when he dreams up what he first starts to think of as the Hollow and realizes what it means, what he might be able to do, he has to take Adam. Adam is Cabeswater’s Magician, and if this little dell on the ley line is a part of Cabeswater, some part of it that didn’t get used up when they’d combined their strengths and their wills to bring Gansey back to life, then it has to be Adam first. He has to know if it’s something entirely new that he’d created in his dreams, or if it’s something that Adam already has a connection with. 

If it is, in fact, some fragment of Cabeswater that had been left over, Adam, as Cabeswater’s Magician, should be able to tell him for sure.

It’s fall in the Hollow, because Ronan has been hot as hell all day, even the normally arctic blast of the BMW’s air conditioning not cooling him off, and he knows exactly why, but he doesn’t think about it, can’t think about it, just tells Adam to grab his lightweight jacket when he picks him up at his shithole of an apartment.

“And bring your cards,” he adds, and Adam’s eyes go wide with surprise, and then narrow with suspicion.

“What did you do, Ronan?” Adam demands, but he grabs the jacket and the cards and follows Ronan down to the BMW even though Ronan doesn’t answer his question.

It isn’t in the same place. It’s further out than the field, which still bears the marks of the tires of all of their vehicles from their many trips into Cabeswater, and Ronan drives further on into what was once a magical forest, and are now just more flat, tan Henrietta fields. He goes another three miles at least, almost four, before the land becomes too scrubby to drive over practically, and they get out and walk. Adam slings his jacket hooked on one finger over his shoulder and carries his cards in his other hand, and he keeps throwing sideways glances at Ronan as they scramble their way through the scrub, catching their clothes on low, reaching bushes, and Ronan deliberately doesn’t look back. He finds the footpath first, what might almost be mistaken for a game trail, but Ronan knows it’s a footpath because that is what he’d seen in his dreams when he’d reached out to find out if there was anything left of Cabeswater. It makes walking through the low scrub easier, though they have to go single file, and Ronan can feel Adam’s gaze on the back of his neck the whole quarter mile until it opens out into the Hollow.

No ancient fairy wood here, no trees whispering in Latin or in the even more ancient language of trees, but just a shallow pond surrounded by a pale ring of beeches intermixed with a couple of poplars barely taller than a house. No whisper of magic except that in the Hollow, under the trees, the temperature plunges forty degrees, and Ronan turns to look at Adam at last.

Adam’s eyes are devouring the Hollow even as he’s sliding on his jacket, and his eyes gleam pale blue in the dappled light beneath the canopy of Autumnal orange and yellow leaves. There is a flat rock that is almost a shelf that protrudes part of the way out over the pond. Adam moves toward it with the eyes of a sleepwalker, his cards gripped in his fist tightly enough to bend the thick deck slightly. He goes to his knees on the shelf of rock that hangs over the edge of the water, shuffles his tarot deck once, and then lays out three cards.

The Tower. The Fool. The Magician.

“How did you…?” Adam says, strangled, “When did you…?”

“Is it new?” Ronan demands. “Did I dream it new, or is it what is left of Cabeswater?”

“The Tower is about change,” Adam says slowly, his eyes wandering the Hollow, seeming to be trying to memorize every position of every tree. “The Fool is a powerful card because its possibilities all start in nothingness and reach into infinity. And the Magician.” Adam doesn’t seem to feel the need to say anything in particular about the card that has always symbolized himself. “What do you call this place?” Adam’s eyes are sharp now, have lost that dreaming quality. 

“The Hollow,” Ronan says. “I dreamed of the footpath, and then drove as far as I could through the field and into the scrub and then walked until I found it. It doesn’t talk like Cabeswater, it isn’t the same, but I don’t know if that’s because I dreamed it new, or if it’s because we used up so much of Cabeswater’s energy for Gansey.”

“You’re the Fool,” Adam says, and Ronan bristles, even though he understands what Adam is saying, knows he isn’t calling him a fool, but because he is Ronan, he still bristles. “No, listen,” Adam says. “It’s not a bad card. All of your possibilities start in nothingness and reach into infinity. Can you think of a card that describes what you do better? Did you know it’s the only card in a standard Tarot deck with a zero on it. All the others are Roman Numerals. It’s a singularity. Like you.”

“That doesn’t answer my fucking question, Adam,” Ronan barks, and Adam’s sharp gaze fixes on him. Cool air wafts up around Ronan in a little dervish of air, and Adam smiles in a way that makes Ronan wonder if Adam had been the cause of that little aerial bitchslap. 

“Did you dream you were looking for Cabeswater? Is that what you were doing in your dream?” Adam asks.

“Yeah. I mean. I was looking for the real Cabeswater, the whole place, because I know it still exists out there somewhere, I feel the… the possibility of it in my dreams, and when I woke up, this is where I came.”

“Help me move this log and this stack of tree branches,” Adam says, and circles around the pond, and Ronan, grumbling at still having been given no answers, takes one end of the log and Adam takes the other end. “Don’t throw it,” Adam warns. “We just want to move it to the edge of the water.”

Ronan lets Adam lead, walking backward, until his feet hit the edge of the pond and he lowers his end carefully down into the trailing edge of the water. “Move yours toward the beeches,” Adam directs, and Ronan, still grumbling, drags his end of the log toward the beeches. The pile of tree branches Adam has him scatter between the trunks of the trees in what seems to be a more or less haphazard fashion. “And there should be a rock,” Adam says, reaching up to scratch the back of his neck, his gaze wandering the Hollow. He starts to walk toward the east, and reaches the very edge of this little patch of forest that Ronan is starting to think he didn’t create out of nothing, but rather out of something very old. Ronan opens his mouth to call him back -- you can only get into the Hollows by the footpath, the rest of it is surrounded in waist high scrub brush and prickly bushes -- when Adam stops on his own and bends down, the elegant line of his back curled low over something he sees on the ground. 

Despite not wanting to want to know what it is in his crankiness, Ronan makes his way around the pond and hunkers down next to Adam to look at a piece of rose quartz the size of one of Nino’s El Grande pizzas. 

“Help me get it out of the ground,” Adam says, his voice and gaze gone dreaming again, and Ronan doesn’t even grumble this time as he helps Adam dig the dirt away from the edges of the stone -- it’s actually shaped more like an infinity symbol, but they can’t tell that until they get one end of it unburied, and it takes them forever because all they’ve got to dig with is their hands, and the rock turns out to be almost twice as big as it had looked. They both strain once they get their fingers under the edges of it, pause, Adam rocks it a little on the slightly narrower end of the conjoined circles, and Ronan tries the same on his end, and eventually they get the thing, which leaves a ten inch hole in the ground, out. They both drop down on the ground beside it, panting with effort. Then Adam says, “Now it goes in the pond.” Ronan just stares at him, boggled, but Adam sounds so sure, he sounds so Magician-like, so they get it lifted up between them, Adam leading them to the shallow end of the pond, and they don’t just put it in the water, they press it down into the muck at the bottom of the pond, they press almost as hard as they’d strained to get it out of the ground, until Adam finally stands up, his eyes sharp again, and says, “That’s all we can do today. But we should come back tomorrow.”

“Are you even going to fucking answer my question, or what?” Ronan bitches, rinsing his filthy hands in the clear water of the pond.

“You already know the answer,” Adam says. “You dreamed of finding Cabeswater, and this is where it lead you. It’s a… a node. It’s a place of possibilities. Dream again tonight, try and find another node.”

“I don’t even know what that fucking means, try to dream a node,” Ronan snaps, but he understands what Adam is telling him to do anyway. Adam gives him that sharp smile, and for the first time since before Gansey had died on the side of the road, Adam, grinning, pulls Ronan close, wraps his elbow around his neck and runs a wet hand through the stubble of Ronan’s hair. 

Ronan drops Adam off at his shithole of an apartment, and doesn’t think of why Adam still lives there when he’s qualified for a full ride at Stanford plus a dozen other smaller scholarships that will cover books and food and gas for the Hondayota for at least two years, not that that will stop Adam from continuing to apply for more scholarships, because he can’t help it. Because it would be money he’d earned, and not just at his shit jobs, but for essays and comparative theology papers and shit like that, money that Adam already has a goodly chunk of in hand, enough that he’s quit the factory, though he still works at Boyd’s while he tries to train Boyd’s new hire to be half as good a mechanic as Adam had been. If the BMW had ever needed a mechanic -- it had not, and it never will, it is a thing of dreams and it runs on dreams, and Adam had just shaken his head in bewilderment the one time Ronan had let him take a look under the hood -- Ronan would have never let anyone but Adam work on it. 

Adam could have better now, Adam could let himself… expand. But there will always be a part of Adam that thinks that Adam doesn’t deserve to expand, and so he’ll stay in his shithole of an apartment until he leaves for Stanford in the fall. 

\--

Ronan drives himself home and lets himself lie down on the couch, not to sleep, he tells himself, but just to think, and then he is clambering up a gully that is almost dry, and when he reaches the top, it opens up into another familiar feeling place, a place that Ronan cannot see, but can only feel the shape of in his mind. He knows it’s there, but not precisely what it is. It had been the same way when he’d found the Hollow. Half afraid he’ll forget, he scrambles for paper and a pencil and draws a map from the place where they’d always parked their cars when Cabeswater had been a magic forest, though he knows he won’t forget.

When he sleeps that night, he dreams of the Hollow, and he feels ozone hovering in the air and the wind blowing through the beeches.

He wakes up early, and would call Adam if he could, if Adam would let him dream him a phone, but since he can’t, he showers and dresses and drives over to Adam’s shithole of an apartment bearing a bag of donuts as a peace offering in case Adam is still sleeping, but Adam is up and waiting for him. When he asks Adam to let him dream him a phone while they work on this project, just a temporary phone, Adam smiles and tells him no, but asks instead where he would go in town to buy a real phone.

Ronan hides his shock, he thinks, fairly well, and takes Adam to the Verizon store in the strip mall, and Adam picks one of the simplest models, no smartphone for him, but one that has a flip up keyboard for texting, and Ronan promises himself right then and there that he will always check his phone to make sure the call or text isn’t from Adam, and to hell with how much he hates the fucking thing. Adam doesn’t go for an extravagant plan, but he pays for unlimited texting, and because the Verizon store isn’t exactly teeming with shoppers at this time of the day -- or any time of the day, this is Henrietta -- the staff member walks Adam patiently through all of the phones features, clearly understanding that he has a phone novice on his hands. Ronan steals it as soon as they leave the store and enters himself into Adam’s contacts, and what the hell, he goes all out and includes his email and his address and his birthday and the land line at the Barns. 

Ronan doesn’t know how to say thank you very well, but the thank you is implied in all the information he programs about himself into Adam’s phone, and Adam, scrolling through his one single contact for far longer than it really merits, seems to know it.

Then he tells Adam about the gully and the feel of the place he can sense at the top of it, and wants to go there and see what there is to see, but Adam wants to go back to the Hollow first, and check on it. He has his cards in a case in his back pocket, and while Ronan isn’t sure what there is to check on, he’s more sure of Adam as far as this thing they are doing goes than he is of himself, and so he agrees.

The footpath is closer to the field this time, at least half a mile closer, and Ronan’s heart begins to pound in his chest at the sight of it. It’s wide enough to walk two abreast now, and Adam bumps genially against his shoulder, giving him a small, secretive smile.

And the Hollow can hardly be called a Hollow any more once they reach it. The beeches are still there, but bigger, taller, and mixed with oaks and poplars, and the pond now trickles over a glittering jumble of rose quartz and into a rivulet of a waterfall, which runs alongside the footpath before it it veers off to the west. Ronan half wants to follow it, see if it takes them somewhere, but Adam insists that they survey the entirety of the Hollow. The log Adam had forced him to drag around so that one end rested in the water is now a huge and magnificent Banyan tree, which Ronan knows is impossible, knows they they are native to another continent, but it’s there and he knows what it is at once. The rock ledge that had stretched out to overhang the pond is underwater now, the pond at least twice as big. 

“Cabeswater, sanando te?” Ronan whispers. ‘Cabeswater, are you healing?’ He thinks he had said it too quietly for Adam to hear, but Adam laughs.

“It’s repopulating itself, it’s renewing itself. It will be different, but it will still be Cabeswater. I like this place. The Hollow. It’s a good start.” He kneels at the base of the Banyan tree and draws a single card. It’s The Sun. Adam smiles and slides his cards back into their case and into his pocket.

“What does it mean?” Ronan asks. “The card?”

“It means it can sustain itself. We should still do work here if we want it to grow faster, but it will grow on it’s own, even if we don’t.” Adam’s face is abruptly filled with wonder. “Listen to the Banyan tree, Ronan,” he says, smiling wide and happy and sweet.

Ronan listens, strains to hear it, and then hears, _Greywaren,_ shiver down its bark and against the palm of his hand. Ronan’s heart thumps hard in his chest, briefly arrhythmic, and he turns to Adam, knowing his face shows what he needs, he doesn’t know how to hide it, and asks, “What do we do to help it grow?”

“Today?” Adam asks, frowning a little. “There are some breaks in the line, just little repairs, but they feed this place. It won’t be as exciting as yesterday.”

“I didn’t think yesterday was exciting until today,” Ronan says seriously, and Adam laughs, long and loud. 

They have to break their way through the scrub to get to the places that Adam says need to be repaired, and sometimes he does nothing but move a tree limb and fling it out into the scrub, and sometimes he digs up handfuls of metallic looking chunks of jagged rocks, which he makes Ronan carry in his pocket, and once he climbs a low cliff face -- It’s all shale, and Ronan holds his breath the whole way up and the whole way back down again -- and uses a piece of the shale that he seems to pluck effortlessly off the wall to beat a pattern into the wall, and Ronan doesn’t know what it means, but he can tell that it clearly is a pattern, it’s not random. “I’ll have to come back and do this one with a chisel,” Adam tells him, when his feet are back on the ground and Ronan can breathe again. “It’s not deep enough into the rock to really open up the line.” Then he finds an open patch of ground about six feet long in the prickly bushes and digs holes every three inches or so across it and has Ronan drop one of the metallic looking chunks of rock into each hole. “I’ll need a tool box,” he says thoughtfully, looking at his dirty hands. “A Cabeswater repair kit,” he says, and laughs softly, his delicate-boned face lit up from within, apparently just at the idea.

“Let’s go find your gully,” Adam says, and they make their way back to the Hollow and down the path and through the scrub to the field. Ronan has the map folded up in his back pocket, but he doesn’t need it, had known he wouldn’t need it, as he drives them west across the field and stops at the edge of the scrub brush and they walk through the low tangle of the scrubby land for a while, and then it’s a mile or so of the prickly little bushes until they find the nearly dry gully. They follow it carefully up, it’s fairly steep, and there is a copse of oaks at the top of the gully, these fully mature trees, tall and straight, and they whisper _Greywaren_ as soon as he comes into sight of them, and Ronan feels his throat want to close with tears. “Non loqueris?” Ronan asks them.’Do you speak Latin?’ The trees whisper softly, and Ronan listens hard, but he can only catch one word.

_Magus._

Magician.

“Cabeswater?” Ronan asks.

_Memoria,_ the trees whisper, and Ronan doesn’t know if the trees remember Ronan or their Magician, or if they remember being Cabeswater.

“They remember you,” Adam tells him, and enters the copse of oaks and kneels on the ground and shuffles his cards and lays out three in a row.

The Moon. The Wheel of Fortune. The Lovers. 

Adam keeps his head bowed over these cards for several minutes, and Ronan waits as patiently as he can.

“The Moon means not to force things here. That this place could be fragile, if it isn’t handled the right way. The Wheel of Fortune means this place is ready to change. The Lovers…” Adam hesitates. “It means partners, working as partners, working together to do what neither of us can do alone.” He stands up and shuffles his cards back into their case and into his pocket. “This will be a tricky one. There should be a stone. There is almost always a stone.” The two of them cast about in the little grove of trees for most of an hour before Ronan finds a chunk of mica speckled granite nearly hidden in the roots of one of the oaks. They work on it for a while, where it is wedged half under a root, and finally Adam shakes his head. “I’ll have to come back with the kit. We can’t force it here. There’s too much chance of fucking it up according to The Moon. What else is there here?”

Ronan leads Adam back into the low expanse of blackberry bushes, and they absently pick and eat a few as Adam picks his way with lithe grace through the patch. 

“Ah, here,” he says, and kneels. Ronan manages to get through the berry patch without anywhere near as much lithe grace as Adam had, but he makes it, and Adam is already digging in the soil with his hands, uncovering another mica flecked piece of granite. This one they manage to get out without much work, and Adam moves it all the way to the back of the patch of berries and digs a shallow hole and puts the rock back into the ground. “Look for feathers,” Adam says, his eyes dreaming again, and Ronan, who hasn’t seen a single feather in the entire time he’s been in this patch of bushes, suddenly sees one snagged on a branch and plucks it free carefully, not wanting to damage it. He sees another, and another, and soon they have a not inconsiderable stack of feathers between the two of them. Adam takes them and begins to wedge them firmly between the roots of the trees, sticking them in the ground at the bases of trees that don’t have roots showing, and Ronan isn’t that surprised to find that there were exactly the same number of feathers as there are trees in the Copse. “That will let them reach up higher,” Adam says enigmatically, and then goes back to the stone that they had left for later. He touches it, almost caresses it, and then, sounding a little uncertain, says, “I think I can get it if you’ll help me.”

Ronan goes to kneel by the stone again, willing to put his back into it, but instead Adam says, “Turn around and take off your shirt.”

Ronan hesitates for a long moment. Since the night he had kissed Adam and Adam had kissed him back, he has thought about Adam that way, but he wasn’t sure Adam felt the same. There had been looks and lingering touches, but there had been no more kissing, and he doesn’t see how taking his shirt off and turning around is going to help. But. But Ronon doesn’t know how to do things halfway, he doesn’t understand casual anything, so he whips his tank top off over his head and turns his back toward Adam. At first Adam’s touch is so light that he can barely feel it, just the barest tracing of a single finger along one of the edges of his tattoo. Then the touch goes firmer, Adam’s whole hand pressed against his back, tracing the tattoo with his fingertips and then stroking again with his whole hand, as though he’s filling in the spaces where the ink darkens Ronan’s skin. Ronan shivers under Adam’s slim, long-fingered hand, and closes his eyes.

He isn’t sure how long it lasts, only that it’s not long enough to make his knees ache where they’re resting on the ground, when Adam makes a low sound of satisfaction, and his hand falls away from Ronan’s back. When Ronan turns to look, Adam is holding the mica speckled piece of granite in both hands, looking down at it, but Ronan can see that his face is flushed even with it tipped down and in the shade of the tree. 

Adam stands up and takes the granite and buries it at the top of the gully, getting his fine-boned hands muddy in the dirty runoff, but apparently not worried about it.

Ronan puts his shirt back on. He wants to ask what Adam had done, when he’d run his hand over Ronan’s back, what magic he’d worked to free the stone that had included having to touch Ronan’s skin, but he doesn’t ask.

“This will be the headstone of the path,” Adam tells him, and looks at Ronan with uncertain eyes. “We need some of these prickly bushes,” he says, when Ronan doesn’t say anything to that. He isn’t sure what to say, and is a little afraid his voice will come out unsteadily at the memory of Adam’s hand on his back. Adam starts off toward one edge of the gully and begins to pull the bushes from the ground out from around the Copse of trees. After a few seconds, Ronan starts to help him, until they’ve cleared an area about ten feet around the Copse of oaks and two or three feet on either side of the gully. Adam carries them by the armful around to the back of the blackberry patch, not seeming to notice or care that that prickly things are scratching the hell out of him, drawing blood in a few places.

“Parrish!” he shouts. “Those things are cutting you all the hell up!”

Adam looks a little amused. “Did you think we could do what we’re trying to do without sacrificing for it?”

Ronan doesn’t know what to say to that, so grabs an armload of his own prickly bushes and accepts his share of scratches and cuts, grumbling the whole time, but not stopping until they’ve moved all the uprooted bushes back behind the berry patch.

“There will be more to do the next time we come,” Adam says, and gives Ronan a careful smile. “We can skip the Hollow tomorrow, it’s mostly going to just need a few check ins. This place we’ll have to visit at least a couple of more times. If you still want to.”

Ronan, aggravated and covered in scratches and welts and a few actual cuts, says, “I didn’t carry all those thorn bushes back there for my health, damn it, Parrish.”

Adam’s face clears a little, some slight expression of anxiety leaving it.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says, and begins to scramble down the gully in a hapless almost slide that leaves Ronan breathless with the recklessness of it, and isn’t that kind of reckless shit supposed to be his department? He keeps expecting Adam to fall over, and starts down quickly after him, but they both reach the bottom unharmed, though their jeans are muddy to the knees.

“What do you mean, it will be the headstone of the path?” Ronan asks as they wade back through the mile of prickly bushes and then out into the scrub until they reach the open field and the car again.

“We set the headstone of the path so you can dream it,” Adam says almost absently. 

Ronan is thunderstruck. “Don’t you think you might want to tell me the things I’m supposed to dream before you assume I can dream them. It wouldn’t have even occurred to me to try to dream a path up that gully.”

Adam looks at him, faintly puzzled. “You would have dreamed it whether I told you to or not,” he says. “That’s what the headstone was for. To mark it in your mind.”

“That’s not how it works,” Ronan half-shouts, and then reins his temper back. “I have to be able to touch a thing, feel the weight of it, hold it in my hands and know everything there is to know about it to bring it out of a dream.”

“You’re not bringing it out of the dream, though, Ronan. You’re just dreaming the nodes into seeds and the seeds into gardens. We worked with what the Hollow already had, but you had to dream it for it to grow. That’s why we’ll still have to visit it occasionally, even though it’s a place that can grow on it’s own. Also to chisel that design into the shale. It needs to be deep, or the ley line there will weaken and the Hollow won’t get all the power that it might need.”

Ronan says nothing to that for a long moment, and then snarls, “You could have told me I was doing that. What if I fuck it up, get it wrong? I can direct the dream if I need to, but I didn’t direct anything about the Hollow in my dreams. It just grew.”

“It’s connected to your power,” Adam says, obviously trying quite deliberately to keep his own temper in the face of Ronan’s ill temper. “If we find a place that needs to be directed, or more likely, when we find places that need to be _connected_ , you might have to direct your dreams, but as long as we’re working on parts of what once was Cabeswater, you’re already just as connected to it as I am. You don’t need to know you’re doing it to let it use your power to grow.” Adam shakes his head irritably. “We’ll have to go back up the Copse tomorrow, because that place had more trees that knew your name, but the ground around it was locking it in. We need to give it a path to grow through. If it were closer to the Hollow, we could connect the two of them, and their power together would get rid of the spoiled ground, but it’s too far. Try to dream me an in-between place tonight, Ronan.” Adam smiles tiredly.

“I don’t understand, what do you mean places that need to be connected? Connected to what?” Ronan growls.

“To each other,” Adam says slowly, as if to a not terribly bright toddler. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but what you are wanting to do is recreate Cabeswater. Not Cabeswater as it was. That can’t happen until we move around enough energy to summon it to the ley line. It can’t exist without the ley line. But it clearly left pieces of itself behind. And if we can get those pieces back to working the way that Cabeswater did, it’s possible that we can recall the rest of the forest. It exists in an always state, Ronan. It always _is_ , somewhere, even if that somewhere is between this world and another. If we put enough of it back together, it might pull Cabeswater back onto the ley line. Our places, our Hollow and the Copse, will still be there, they’ll just become part of Cabeswater as a whole.”

“How do you know this shit?” Ronan demands, half-pissed, but half-hopeful and not sure which one he should be showing Adam. He’s probably showing the half-pissed part. It’s kind of his default. 

“Persephone, a lot of it, and I’ve been spending time with Maura and Calla and even Artemus, when he comes out of the tree. He says he finds my spirit restful. Even Gwenllian, some of it, when she’s not being totally crazy. I would have asked you to look for Cabeswater before now if I thought that any of it still existed. But I can’t feel it now unless I’m in it, but when I’m in it, it still feels the same. No, not the same, but like it could be grown into more than what it is. And if we can do that, there’s no reason Cabeswater wouldn’t concentrate its energy in a place where it’s been before. It’s like water running downhill. If we prepare enough downhill spaces for it, Cabeswater might flow naturally into the place where it existed before, because there is a Cabeswater shaped impression here already.” 

“You’re telling me that if I dream of places that Cabeswater left behind, if I dream those places bigger, then Cabeswater will come back?” Ronan asks, fairly sure he’s following, but wanting to be totally sure.

“If we can find enough of those places and nurture them like you’d nurture a garden, there is a not unlikely chance that Cabeswater will return. It may not be exactly the same. The places we grow, for example, will stay the way we grow them. But the trees will know you, they will speak Latin to you. It may not be the exact Cabeswater we knew before, but it will still be Cabeswater,” Adam says. “If you want to,” Adam adds quickly. “If you want that to happen. If you don’t, we can build you places like the Hollow and I can set limits on them. But, Ronan, we both know you’re an all or nothing kind of guy. I don’t know how long it will take to build the slope necessary to let Cabeswater slide back into its last known position. If you were working alone, I don’t know if it could be done. But I’ve been studying with the Fox Way women and I’ve been going over ley line phenomenon with Gansey, just like you have, and I feel…” He stops and takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I feel like if we both want to do it, it can be done. But it has to be both of us.”

Ronan nods and then shakes his head, and then he laughs raucously, sounding almost like Chainsaw when he does it. “Of course I want it back. Of course we should do it together. I don’t know how long it took me to dream Cabeswater as I was growing up, but I get the feeling it was a long time, Parrish. Of course it will be faster with a Magician.”

“We will have to dream every day, we’ll have to go out every day we can,” Adam warns him. “I am going to Stanford in the fall, Ronan, but I’ll come back every break and help if we don’t get it done by then. I’ll come back over the summer breaks. Cabeswater is part of who I am now. I don’t want to lose that part of myself that is the Magician.”

“I hate to say it, Parrish, but Cabeswater or not, I think you’re stuck with that part,” Ronan says, but he is grinning maniacally as he says it. “You’re reading tarot cards and consorting with the witch women of Fox Way. What else could you possibly be?”

“I’m going to tell Blue you called them ‘the witch women of Fox Way,’” Adam says, but he’s grinning back. “There will probably be a fat lip in it for you.”

“I can take the maggot,” Ronan says snidely. “I’d just have to put my hand on the top of her head and hold her out at arms length and she wouldn’t be able to reach me.” 

“I’m telling her you said that one, too,” Adam says firmly. “She’s wee, but fierce. She’ll get you when you least expect it.”

“Parrish,” Ronan says, suddenly serious. “Come stay at the Barns with me until you leave for Stanford. This driving into town to get you shit is going to seriously eat into our work day.” He’s trying to sound like he’s making a valid point, but the truth is, he wants Adam to stay at the Barns with him, and that’s all.

Adam’s smile fades a little around the edges, but doesn’t entirely disappear. “You let me pay for all groceries,” he says. “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it. And I’ll buy the expensive kinds of cheeses so you feel like you paid your fair share,” Ronan says, and Adam snorts laughter. 

“I’ll pack up my apartment tomorrow and let the office know I’m not renewing my lease next month. I was already month to month since I wasn’t going to be here long enough for another six month lease.” Adam smiles faintly. “If we bring Cabeswater back while Blue and Gansey and Cheng are out roadtripping across the country, Gansey is going to be so pissed off,” he says. Then he frowns slightly. “If you don’t mind the women at Fox Way knowing what we’re doing, they may be able to give me some good advice, or at least advice on how to do things faster.”

“Tell anyone you want to,” Ronan says. “Too bad Sargent isn’t here. I bet with her magic boosting super powers she could speed things along.”

“Gwenllian is a mirror, too,” Adam says matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, but she’s also crazy and just as likely to be distracting as she is to be helpful,” Ronan points out.

“Point taken,” Adam says. “Gwenllian only if we get stuck. But the rest?”

“Why not?” Ronan says. “They know more than we do about this stuff, and it would be good to know ahead of time if this is insanely dangerous.” “ 

“Would it stop you?” Adam asks softly.

“Probably not, but I’d take what precautions I could,” Ronan says. 

“I’m going to Fox Way. Dream me a between point, or better yet, dream me three or four in-between points tonight, Ronan.”

“And the other stuff. The Hollow and the Copse. I don’t have to think about those? I don’t have to dream them better?” Ronan asks, just to be sure he’s clear.

“You may need to at some point, if we need to connect or move them, but no. You can just dream and cast your mind out looking for parts of Cabeswater. The rest of it will take care of itself, with a little routine ley line maintenance. You’ll have to drop me off at my shithole.”

Ronan flushes. “Man,” he says, but the words _I’m sorry for calling it that,_ just won’t come out of his mouth. “I should have kept my opinions about your place to myself,” he manages.

“Yeah, you should have,” Adam says. “It may have been a shithole, but it was _my_ shithole.” 

“That’s right, take pride in your shithole, Parrish,” Ronan agrees heartily, and they begin laughing at the same time. 

\--

Ronan throws himself down on the couch as soon as he gets back to the Barns, but there’s too much possibility in his head for him to sleep. As a Dreamer, he honestly can sleep almost at will. How long he stays asleep is always a question mark, but _going_ to sleep is usually something he can do any time he wants to. 

But the Hollows, and the Copse, and Adam coming to stay with him at the Barns, and maybe the ability to bring Cabeswater back. All of that is too much. He strips down to his skin and gets into the shower. Immediately, his thoughts go to the feeling of Adam’s hand tracing around and over his tattoo, and he doesn’t really try to stop them. He’s been jerking off over Adam Parrish since nearly the day he had met him. It’s way too late to let it bother him now. He has an array of fantasies, each of them dirtier than the last, but this time it’s just the calloused skin of Adam’s hand dragging across his back, and he doesn’t last more than two minutes before he’s biting his lip and shooting across the backs of his fingers.

He had kissed Adam. And Adam had kissed him back. Things had happened between then and now. Funerals and police investigations and finishing school, and Adam’s breakneck schedule at exams time, and the acceptance to Stanford and all of the scholarship awards and there had never seemed to be a right time to try to get Adam alone and see if he would let Ronan kiss him again. Too much fear that Adam hadn’t been thinking very clearly the night it had happened and might regret it.

But Adam staying with Ronan at the Barns means something to Ronan, and he knows that Adam knows that. He doesn’t expect sexual favors or anything, but it means that Ronan wants him around all the time, even when he’s being an asshole. And Adam saying yes, and without what Ronan had suspected -- that he insist that he pay Ronan what he was paying for the shithole, but just for groceries… That means something too. That Adam wants to be around Ronan, too, even when he’s being a shithead. And maybe more than that.

Ronan won’t push, but Ronan will watch, and if he gets his chance and he thinks Adam is willing, he won’t hesitate to kiss Adam again. If Adam doesn’t want things to be that way, Ronan still wants him around, even when he’s being an asshole. And he can tell Adam that, and Adam will believe him because Ronan never lies. So maybe if the kissing Adam plan doesn’t go so great, things still might be pretty okay.

He climbs into his own bed naked, tempted to jerk off again, as thinking of kissing Adam is enough to get him more or less ready to do so. But Adam wants three or four fragments of Cabeswater tonight if Ronan can get them, and Ronan wants to give Adam what he wants.   
\--

Ronan almost forgets his promise to himself to check his phone to see if it is Adam calling or texting the next morning, and just barely manages to fumble it off his nightstand and up to his ear. “What?” he says, and Adam’s laugh makes him smile.

“Maura and Calla are going to help me scry this morning to see if there are places we can’t see into, like they couldn’t see into Cabeswater. Do you want to be here for that?” Adam asks. “Maura is making french toast. She told me to tell you she knows how your mother used to make it.” 

Ronan’s throat closes up tight for a long moment, and then he finally manages, “Yeah, man. I’ll get dressed and be there in a while. Ask her what the secret ingredient is.” Because he has to know if she really does know how his mother used to make it.

He hears Adam ask Maura the question.

“Cinnamon baked apples,” Adam says, and Ronan is suddenly, God help him, looking forward to breakfast at Fox Way. 

“I’m on my way,” Ronan says, and hangs up. 

He puts on clean but faded black jeans, a white tank top, and hiking boots, because he knows at least one of the places they’re going to go today are going to require them. He has three places in his mind, three maps to three fragments, though he doesn’t bother to draw them out this time. He’s sure of his ability to remember them. Three new pieces of Cabeswater, two of them in-betweens, like Adam had wanted. Depending on what the Fox Way ladies can find out, they might have a busy day.

The Hondayota is sitting in the Fox Way driveway, and Ronan decides right then that he’s going to dream a new Hondayota, identical to the old one, except that this one will never break down and will take a lot less gas. He could make it take no gas at all, but Adam would figure that out too quickly. But if it just never breaks down, it will take Adam a while to figure that out, and maybe by then he’ll have sold or junked the Hondayota and gotten a real car. Ronan pulls the BMW up to the curb, and gets out of the car, bracing himself, as always, for the bedlam that is 300 Fox Way.

Calla answers the door with what looks like a Mimosa in her hand. “Snake,” she hisses, but her eyes glint with malicious good humor, which is basically the only kind of humor that Calla possesses, so he’ll take what he can get. Besides, he secretly likes Calla. 

“Psychic,” Ronan hisses back, and Calla throws open the door and lets him in. Chainsaw squawks and lands on Ronan’s naked shoulder, her claws scratching at him, but he’s used to it. “Get you and your bird in the house. Maura put your french toast in the oven so it wouldn’t get cold,” she tells him. “She’s with the other one in the reading room. Not much to see for non-psychics. Gwenllian is asleep. Take advantage of that and eat fast,” Calla advises.

Ronan takes his plate out of the oven, finds the syrup, and just looks at the neatly cubed pieces of cinnamon coated apple on top of his french toast for a few long seconds. There’s not a scrap of peel on them. Exactly how his mother had made them for him. He drowns them in syrup, and takes them to the table, eating quickly, because in his experience, in this house it’s a good idea to do anything you really want to get done done quickly, or risk permanent interruption. He rinses his plate off in the sink, because he was raised to be a good guest, whether or not that always works out for him in this house, and then makes his way to the reading room. The door is closed. He thinks about knocking lightly, then decides that noise might interrupt a scrying, and just lets himself in.

All three of them have bowls filled to the brim with some kind of dark liquid, Ronan thinks grape juice by the smell, and are bent over their bowls in such a way that their eyes are all in shadow, and it looks eerily like they have no eyes. Each of them is holding a pencil and there is a pad of paper with the tip of the pencil resting on the top sheet. Maura, Ronan sees, already has two sheets of paper torn off and facing down on the table. Calla and Adam both have one. As he watches, Calla begins to write without looking away from her bowl, her handwriting neat and precise as if she was looking at the paper. She writes: Lightning struck elm 2 miles west of corpse road, tree with owl nest, large blank area. Then she rips off the paper and turns it over, sitting it on top of the other piece next to her. Maura is writing again as well, but Ronan can’t see what she’s writing from his place just inside the door.

As he watches, Adam begins to write, and Ronan leans around his body to see what he’s writing down. It is: 4 miles through field, ¼ mile through scrub bushes, large area, the Hollow? He rips of his sheet and lays it down on top of his first one. For at least five minutes, none of them write anything. Then Maura begins to write again, and then Calla. Calla writes: 5 miles west into field 1 mile of scrub and thorn bushes, circle around standing stone, small area. She rips it off and sits it on her pile. She blinks and looks up, looks at Maura’s blank face and then at Adam’s, and then claps her hands twice, loudly. “Alright, that’s enough for now. No more wandering away from our bodies for at least two days between scrying attempts.” Ronan gets the feeling that she’s talking to him.

“Is it dangerous?” Ronan asks.

“It can be, if you wander too far or too often. How many did we get?” Maura has four, Calla three, and Adam two. “Not bad, Adam,” Calla says. “Of course, you’re only going to get better. Persephone taught you, and she was as good as Maura.”

“Better,” Maura says, her face lined with grief for a moment. “She knew how to really tether herself to her body.” Maura looks at Adam. “She taught you that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Adam says. “First, second, and third lesson.”

“It’s not a surprise that you got a little less than us, then,” Maura says. “You’ll learn to stretch your tether a little more with practice.” Maura looks at Ronan. “If he scries while he stays with you, don’t let him do it alone. You can check his hands or face to see if they get cold to give you an idea of when to wake him up.”

Ronan nods. “I have three,” he says. “From dreams.”

“Dream scrying?” Calla asks, brows arched. She sips at her mimosa. “How does that work exactly. 

“When I go to sleep, I tell myself to look for little leftover pieces of Cabeswater,” Ronan says. “When I wake up, I know where they are.”

“Let’s compare notes then, shall we,” Calla says, and reads off her sets of directions, one set at a time, giving them a lot more detail than she had on her notepad. Maura turns one of hers over at Calla’s last set of directions.

“Duplicate,” she says.

Maura reads her three, two of which sound almost exactly like two of the places Ronan had dreamed of last night, and hers are just as detailed as Calla’s. They’re both writing out fleshed out sets of directions on new sheets of paper.

Adam reads his, a little less certainly, but Ronan can tell he’s a hell of a lot more comfortable with these women than he had been only a few weeks ago. When he reads the second one, he explains that he’s pretty sure that one is the one that Ronan had originally taken him to, wanting to know if it was something he had dreamed that was new, or if it was something left over from Cabeswater. “We call it the Hollow,” he tells them. “I could see all the way around it, but I couldn’t see into it.”

“That sounds like Cabeswater type magic, alright,” Maura says. “Are you completely sure this Hollow that you’ve already found wasn’t a new dream formed by your sleeping mind?”

Adam answers the question for him. “I can use my Magician powers in the Hollow. Not the ones I’ve been working on with you ladies, but the ones that I had control over when I had access to Cabeswater.”

“It seems likely that it’s a pocket of leftover Cabeswater then,” Calla says. “Though the snake should try to dream you a new place and see whether you can use those abilities in the new place for a greater degree of certainty.”

“Are you sure he wouldn’t be able to use his abilities in a new place?” Ronan asks. “I originally dreamt Cabeswater, after all.”

Calla laughs. “No, you didn’t. You merely put Cabeswater where it was. Cabeswater exists at all times, in different places. Your power drew it to where it was, but you didn’t create Cabeswater. So yes, a new place should be an adequate test to make sure what we’re finding here are the last dribs and drabs of Cabeswater’s existence on this plane.”

Maura clears her throat. “I know what you boys are doing and why you want to do it, but Cabeswater is a ‘twixt place. It may come back, but it may not be in the incarnation you expect it to. I _think_ it will, both because he is the Greywaren and you are the Magician and you want it to be that way, and because Cabeswater existed in our dimension in the form you saw it in for many years before the demon uncreated it. I think it’s left enough of an impression of itself here on this ley line to virtually recreate itself. But it is still dangerous. There’s always the possibility that you’re going to get something much more dangerous back in its place.”

“Like what?” Ronan demands.

“Like a swamp occupied by revenants that use hobs to lure people into the woods and devour them,” Calla says so matter-of-factly that Ronan believes that she believes it’s a possibility. “I’m with Maura on this. I think you can bring it back as close as to what it was as it can be, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider the other possible consequences.”

“Can you give us some kind of statistic to work with here,” Adam asks, visibly dismayed by the swamp possibility. 

“I’d say you have about a 95% chance of bringing back Cabeswater as it remembers being in this place, if it can be done at all,” Calla says thoughtfully. “It would be less if you both didn’t already have such clear memories of it. It will draw at least parts of what it is from your minds. It would be better if Blue were here, but we try not to ask her to use her gifts too much, and something like this could actually draw enough energy from her to hurt or even kill her, if Cabeswater was close enough to making its way back to the ley line and just needed a boost of power to do it. As it is, as the Greywaren and the Magician, neither of you are in any danger from it.”

Maura taps the slips of notepaper into a neat stack and hands it to Adam. “That should keep you busy for at least a little while, plus I know there were things you wanted to go back to check on at the other two sites. By the time you need us to scry again, we should be able to do it.”

“Why exactly are you being so helpful,” Ronan asks suspiciously, and ignores Adam hissing his name in reprimand. 

Calla shrugs. “I like having Cabeswater on the ley line. It gives it a power boost.”

Maura sighs. “If you can get Cabeswater back, Artemus will go back to the forest and inhabit a tree that isn’t in the backyard of the house I live in with my lover,” she says. “Plus I’m afraid Gwenllian is going to be successful at one of her attempts to kill him at some point.” 

Those are all answers that Ronan can understand. He merely nods. “We’ll try not to bring back a swamp with revenants and hobs,” he says.

“Don’t hurry so much that you don’t keep yourselves safe, but there is some hurry involved. The longer Cabeswater is gone, the more these little leftover bits of it will fade,” Maura says.

“We understand,” Adam says, and Ronan thanks Maura for the french toast, and they leave with their little stack of directions.

“Do you have hiking boots?” Ronan asks once they’re out of Fox Way. “At least one of my dream locations is going to require something like hiking boots.”

“I’ve got steel toed work boots from the factory job,” Adam says.

“They’ll have to do,” Ronan says. 

\--

They decide to try one of the psychics’ directions first. Calla’s, directing them five miles northwest across the field, through a mile or so of scrub and thorn bushes, circle to the east around two standing stones. They do it because it’s the only one of the sets of directions they have that indicates that it’s a small area, and if possible, they want to get to those first and get them active again before they can fade out of existence. They’ve all used the spot where their cars had always been parked to start the directions from, so they don’t have any trouble finding their way from her directions. They are a little surprised to see that the standing stones she was referring to are not just stones, but are actually standing stones, the kind stonehenge is made from. They circle around them to the east, and they’re standing in a small valley. It slants downward, narrow and secluded, and is awash with what seems like every kind of wildflower he has ever seen in his life. With the way the land folds into a valley, Ronan expects there to be some kind of creek or brook running along the bottom of it, but there’s nothing like that. The only other thing in the valley is a huge ash tree, probably one of the biggest trees Ronan has ever seen, and he’s got Cabeswater’s behemoths to compare it to. He circles around it, looking up and up and up to its far distant top. 

“We have to save it,” Ronan says, without thinking of why, only thinking that it’s important somehow, that this tree not fade away as Cabeswater’s magic begins to leave the area around the ley line.

Adam kneels at the base of the tree, shuffles his cards, and draws three. 

The Empress. The World. Strength.

“These are heavy cards, Ronan,” Adam says, sitting back on his heels and looking down at them. “The Empress is the archetype of feminine power and a more general sense of being something someone is attracted to. The World is a heavy burden born for a very long time without much in the way of a reward. And Strength in conjunction with the other two cards is pretty much self explanatory.” Adam stands up and looks around the glen, but there is nothing but the tree and the wildflowers, nothing to anchor it into the real world. “There’s almost always a rock,” he mutters, brushing at his lower lip with the edge of his thumb in a gesture Ronon has seen Gansey do a hundred times, but never in a way that Ronan finds so very distracting. He looks over his shoulder at the entrance to the glen and looks at the standing stones.

Adam kneels at the base of the tree, recovers his cards and shuffles them, and lays out a single card.

Strength.

“I don’t think there’s anything to do here,” Adam says finally. “I think the standing stones are the gateway to the glen, and as long as they remain standing, the tree will be fine.”

“Blue’s dad lives in a tree sometimes,” Ronan says, as they both stare. It would take at least eight men linking arms to get all the way around that tree.

“It could be a tree-light,” Adam says. “It explains the Empress coming out of the deck. Better, I think, if we leave her be. She’s safe enough here, with the standing stones keeping the glen in place. We should check on her from time to time, maybe ask Artemus if he can tell us anything about her, but I don’t think she’s in danger of fading.” Adam goes over and examines the standing stones carefully. “They’re planted deep. I’d say we’re only seeing the top halves of them. I think she’s safe here. Although she only makes me want to get Cabeswater back here more. She’s so alone.”

“Blue told me they sleep a lot, sometimes for decades or centuries. She may not even realize that she’s alone here yet,” Ronan says, and turns to circle west around the stones. Adam follows him a moment later, shuffling through sheets of paper as he walks. 

Ronan explains that two of Maura’s scryings had sounded a lot like duplicates of the places he’d dreamed. Adam folds the set of directions leading to the Ash and the duplicates from Maura and puts them and his own set of directions to the Hollows in one back pocket, and folds the ones left over into the other. “But the Copse isn’t that far from here,” Ronan says. “And I got two in-between points between it and the Hollow.” 

Adam’s eyes go wide and his delicate featured face opens up in a broad grin. He slings his newly crafted Cabeswater repair kit, which resides in a battered old gym bag in blue and gold, over one shoulder (except for the shovel, which Ronan is carrying), and says, “It was a little more to the east I think.”

Ronan nods. There’s no need to think about it. He’s got a map of these places in his head, and he knows exactly where they are in relation to one another once he’s actually been to one of them. Now that he’s been to this one, he knows the Copse is a little north and east of here. He knows where his dream locations are too. One of them isn’t that far east from the Copse of oaks and blackberry bushes, and the other is southeast, leading down toward the Hollow. 

Even still, he almost misses the gully because it’s not a gully anymore. He almost walks right past it, his eyes skimming the ground for the thin trickle of run off. Adam has to call him back. When he turns, he sees that the gully has become a roughly-hewn set of uneven stairs set into the side of the hill. They don’t look safe or sturdy, but as soon as Ronan gets his foot on the bottom step he realizes that they are both. This path was meant for them, made by them, and there isn’t anything to worry about while on the path. It’s made of the magic that Adam had wrought with the stone that had been stuck under the roots of one of the trees. Ronan suspects that he helped in some way, but other than letting Adam touch his tattoo, he doesn’t really know in what way that had been. Except that Adam says that Ronan dreams the nodes into seeds and then into gardens. That he doesn’t even have to try to do it, it’s just part of what being the Greywaren is. 

The Copse of oaks is now a small forest, and trees that had been mature are now old. They have grown both upward and outward -- all the feathers, Ronan sees, are gone -- and it’s impossible to see the ten feet they had cleared all the way around the trees trunks because that ground has already been swallowed by new trunks, not the really old ones, but mature trees again. 

Adam takes out his tarot deck and shuffles it and lays out a single card.

The Sun. 

Adam grins down at it, clearly pleased. “Growth and prosperity,” he tells Ronan. “Fertility and permanence.”

_Greywaren_ , the trees whisper to him, and Adam walks around the back of the blackberry patch -- there is a little bit of ground still showing here where they had cleared out around it -- and Ronan sees that the prickly bushes they had left piled behind the cleared out land have sunken down and turned green and plush, have transformed into a massive bed of ferns with huge white day lilies growing among them. Butterflies in every color of the rainbow flit through the air above the blackberry patch and the ferns, and the blackberry bushes, which had been of a fairly moderate size, are now thick and lush. Ronan can smell the ripe berries on the air, and his mouth waters for a taste of them. He picks a handful and they fill his mouth with the sweet, warm taste of summer. 

Adam checks the cleared earth on either side of the berry patch, frowning slightly. “The berries still have a little room to grow, but we’re going to have to clear around the trees again. Look for acorns on the ground and pocket as many as you can. We’re going to have to spread the Copse out a bit. And I’m going to need,” he pauses, stroking his lower lip again, which Ronan can’t help but watch, which he feels certain should feel all kinds of wrong since he knows where Adam had picked the habit up, but which he is still half-mesmerized by anyway. “Bricks,” he says finally, and a little doubtfully. “There won’t be any, but watch for small, flat stones.”

“So am I clearing the area around the Copse?” Ronan asks. 

“Yes, clear it out as far as you can. All the way to the path if you can, and to the hill that the gully used to run down. I’ll take care of looking for stones and acorns.” Adam looks up, suddenly apparently guilty. “Or you can do stones and acorns and I can clear out the area around the trees.”

“These shrubs don’t have deep roots, I can handle them,” Ronan says. “What are we doing with them after we clear them?”

“Roll them down the hillside. Don’t get any on the path, and you don’t have to throw them down, just roll them off the edge and let them land wherever they land.” 

Ronan begins shoveling bushes out of the ground -- they really aren’t rooted very deeply, a single shove of the blade is enough to loosen them and then toss them down the incline. Adam is climbing around between the trunks of of the now massive oaks, tossing something into a pile that appear to be acorns when Ronan works his way around to that side of the Copse, and then Adam, taking a sharp, narrow bladed knife from his Cabeswater repair kit, begins to shave off strips of bark from the huge trunks. He’s extremely careful, doesn’t cut too deeply, just cuts thin strips of the outer layers of the bark away from the biggest, strongest looking trees. After a long and sweaty time, Adam has a huge pile of bark strips and a smaller pile of acorns. The bark strips he leaves where they are for the moment, but the acorns he brings back into the area that Ronan has cleared and uses a spade to dig a shallow hole, drop in an acorn, and pat the ground flat again. Ronan isn’t sure why he’s bothering, these trees will clearly keep on growing on their own without their help.

“But why?” Ronan asks. “They were already growing on their own.” 

“Because we need new trees, not bigger trees, and if we don’t give them clear ground to grow in, they won’t get any sun under the canopy of the bigger trees,” Adam says absently. “We’ve got to keep the bushes from climbing back up the incline, and new growth forest will do that, if the bushes you threw down the hill weren’t enough to make enough ground cover.”

“And what about the strips of bark?” Ronan asks, fascinated and dubious.

“No rocks,” Adam says, throwing up his hands a little as though in disgust. “There are always rocks. Next time I’m bringing my own rocks. But this time I am going to have to get creative with the path we lay between here and your next in-between point. You said it wasn’t far?”

“Not even half a mile, but Adam, you’re going to need a hell of a lot more bark than that to cover half a mile of rocky terrain with tree bark as a path.” He doesn’t bother to hide his dubious sneer.

“I’m just going to line the path on either side with bark,” Adam says. “It will grow together and connect these two nodes.” 

“You’re out of your mind, Parrish,” Ronan says, both believing and disbelieving at the same time.

“Look what we did yesterday, Ronan, look around you. Did you not feel the stairs coming up where the gully was yesterday? Couldn’t you feel how sturdy they were? I can line the strips of bark up end to end on both sides of the trail to your next in-between node, and they’ll grow together and form a path connecting this part of Cabeswater to the next part of Cabeswater. Cabeswater is a nexus of power. It wants to be connected, it wants to grow together.” 

Ronan wants to argue that it’s not possible, that the strips of bark are just dead pieces of wood, but he _had_ seen this place yesterday, and he had seen the place where they had dumped all the prickly shrubs transformed into a field of ferns and daylilies, had seen Adam set the headstone for the path of steps that now run up the hillside, and after that, after seeing Adam knowing how to _do_ that, it seems stupid to argue.

“This is going to take fucking forever,” Ronan grouses, but he helps Adam scoop all the strips of bark into an empty plastic shopping bag he pulls out of the Cabeswater repair kit, and Ronan leads them to the next place, the next node, and Adam stops every thirty seconds or so to lay out strips of bark, and Ronan manages to contain his interior grumbling, and just can’t be all that surprised that the bag doesn’t come up empty until they step into a clearing with a familiar looking half rotted tree in it, partially hollowed out but tall enough for one big person or several smaller people to step inside. The stream is there, burbling out from a fissure between two rocks to slide down the hillside. The first thing Ronan does is check the stream for fish, but there are none to be seen..

Adam has gone a little pale at the sight of this place, once familiar, though not quite the same in details. It seems to be the clearing the way they had originally found it, the Cave of Ravens gone somewhere else. It’s surrounded by the prickly bushes as well, and Ronan doesn’t even have to be asked. He unlimbers the shovel from over his shoulder and goes to work clearing them out from around the Clearing. “What do I do with them?” Ronan wants to know, and Adam, still too pale and with unsteady hands, takes out his cards and shuffles them and lays out three.

The Magician. The Star. The Lovers.

Adam studies the three cards for what seems like a long time to Ronan while he tosses the prickly bushes up into a heap as he clears out the area around the Clearing, although it’s not a clearing, not really, not anymore. There are no trees around it to make it into a clearing, but it’s still their Clearing.

“The Star is for inspiration,” Adam says, looking up from the line of cards with his face dreaming again, not like he’s disconnected, but like he’s _deeply_ connected. He circles around to where Ronan has made considerable headway toward clearing out bushes and uses his spade to dig neat holes in a double ring around the edge of what once was their Clearing. He takes acorns from his pockets and drops them into the holes, covering them with dirt again with his foot, and then he goes to hunker by the water. Ronan sees him wave a hand over it, and in spite of himself, he has to see, and yes, there are fishes in the stream again, fishes with red bellies and silver backs. “I need some inspiration, Ronan,” Adam says, his gaze lingering on the hollowed out tree. “Be a star for me.”

Ronan does the only thing he can think to do. He puts down the shovel and walks into the hollowed out tree. Inside is warm and smells of dampness and rot, but is somehow still not unpleasant. When he turns to look out of the opening, Adam’s face is twisted with fear, but then the dream of Adam within the dreaming tree strokes his hands down Ronan’s back and presses a kiss to the nape of his neck, and whispers, “Hoc est necesse ut omnis consecratio,” into his ear. _This place needs consecration to be whole._ Then Ronan steps out of the tree and into the sunlight again, and Adam in the Clearing, the real Adam, looks so relieved that his eyes glint and he looks quickly away.

“Don’t do that ever again,” Adam snaps, his voice unsteady.

“You told me to be a star for you,” Ronan says, only a little defensively. “The dreaming tree can be a place for lies or inspiration or for seeing the future.”

“That thing has a name?” Adam asks, his voice strident, and Ronan walks over to him and wraps his hands around Adam’s upper arms, doing his best to be calming, in light of Adam’s clear fear of the dreaming tree. 

“I’ve always known about the dreaming tree,” he tells Adam seriously, keeping his voice even and neutral, even as his belly jumps a little at being this close to Adam, touching him, while Adam looks at him. “You can’t trust it all the time, but it wants to be back in Cabeswater, where it can pull power from the ground, so I think we can trust it this time.”

“What did you see?” Adam asks, seeming almost unwilling.

“You were in there with me. You said _’Hoc est necesse ut omnis consecratio’_ and you kissed me.” Ronan puts his fingertips to the back of his neck. “Here.” It takes more willpower than Ronan wants to admit to needing to confess to Adam about the kiss in the dreaming tree, but he never lies, and this is something Adam may need to know, something his power may be able to translate.

Adam’s cheeks flush deeply, but he has that dreaming look to him again, and he walks around Ronan once, until he’s standing in front of him again. Sweat prickles on the back of Ronan’s neck at being circled like this by Adam. He says, “The Lovers has come up for us twice,” he says. “Things we have to do together that we can’t do separately. Sometimes the Lovers is a literal card, sometimes it means something more spiritual. There are lots of ways to consecrate places. Priests used to consecrate holy ground by walking the ground and misting it with holy water from their hands and with censers of burning incense while chanting prayers.” Adam is still flushing a little, but most of it has faded away under that dreaming look. Ronan wonders if he could see himself dreaming, if he would look like Adam looks now.

His heart is pounding in his chest, because he knows what even older cultures had done to consecrate holy ground, Gansey had been a veritable stockpile of information on that score, and he has thought about being with Adam, but never for any reason other than wanting to be with Adam. He thinks, he _senses_ , that the kiss in the dreaming tree had been the only part of the vision that had been a lie. He senses that being with Adam here might consecrate this ground, but that it would twist it up, twist _them_ up, to do it like that, with a purpose in mind other than the simplest of purposes of pleasing each other. 

“Pagans used blood,” he says, hearing his voice come out hoarse, and Adam blinks at him, and some of that dreaming expression eases out of his face. “And whose blood could possibly be more powerful here than the Magician’s and the Greywaren’s?” Ronan asks.

Adam is almost entirely present in his eyes again. He says, sounding certain, “The kiss was a trick, a trap. A way to accomplish the goal, but it would have…” He flushes again. “If we ever get there, it can’t be for something we do for Cabeswater.” 

Ronan nods, grateful not to have been the one that had to say the words, and almost transcendent that Adam had said them, which can only mean that Adam thinks about Ronan and him, together that way.

Adam’s expression firms up. “Okay then, blood. We shouldn’t need much. Just enough to sprinkle a circle around the clearing, droplets, I mean to say, not arterial spray or anything.”

“Yeah, Parrish, I know what the word sprinkle means, and I’m a good Catholic boy, I know how holy ground was consecrated back in the day. Do we have a knife?”

Adam pulls the slim, sharp blade that he’d used to peel strips of bark off of the largest of the oaks in the Copse. He doesn’t hesitate even to wipe it clean on his jeans, just slips the tip against the palm of his left hand and slices, a long slash, but not deep. “I’ll walk one way, you walk the other,” he says, and hands the blade over to Ronan, his palm cupped to keep the blood pooling in it from spilling out. He walks to the ring of new trees he had planted, and flicks his hand so that his blood spatters the earth there, and Ronan hears a faint whisper of disappointment from the dreaming tree. 

He slices his left palm open, and starts where Adam had started, walking the circle in the other direction, flinging drops of his blood between the two rows of acorns Adam had planted, and he hears Adam incanting in Latin, “Quapropter suscipe benedictionem hanc consecrationem sanguinis isto,” and joins his voice with Adam’s, though Adam’s phrasing is atrocious and he’ll have to make sure to tell Adam that he does the Latin translations for things like this in the future. He thinks it will work, though, and they have to both be saying the same thing, which is, roughly: _Accept this blood for the consecration of this place._ They both walk the complete circle, and tiny blood red flowers litter the ground between the circles of acorns Adam had planted here, almost too bright to look at, the color of them is so vivid, when they finish walking. Adam takes Ronan’s bleeding left hand in his own, and presses the wounds together -- Ronan feels a jolt of something like electricity arc up his spine as their blood mingles -- and then leads Ronan over to the stream and plunges their hands into the icy water, which must be much deeper than it looks because their hands vanish up to their elbows, and Ronan doesn’t even feel the bottom.

When they pull their hands out again, still linked, Adam takes Ronan’s left hand in both of his and turns it over. There is a fine white scar traced across the palm of his hand, but it has the look of a long healed injury. Adam holds his own up for Ronan to see.

“It would have worked,” Adam says seriously. “If we had done it the other way, it would have worked, but most of the power of it would have gone into the tree. It would have stolen almost all of it. It can’t help it. It’s a hungry thing.” Ronan shivers at the words, but doesn’t deny them. He isn’t afraid of the dreaming tree the way that Adam clearly is, but then, Ronan has always been able to tell dream from reality. The tree can’t trick him the way it tricks others. Even as he thinks it, he thinks of the press of Adam’s lips at the nape of his neck and feels himself shiver again, but pleasantly this time. It doesn’t scare him, but while he is in it, it feels real, just like it would for anyone else.

Adam wipes his left hand dry on the leg of his jeans and goes to collect his cards. He shuffles them, and selects one off the top of the deck and places it down.

It’s the King of Wands. 

Adam doesn’t offer an explanation to its meaning, but merely tucks it back into the deck, and says, “We’ll have to wait for the others. This one took too much of our… our animus. Throw the bushes in the stream, though,” he says, and begins picking up armloads of bushes and dropping them one at a time into the stream, which drags them quickly away. “Just one more trip, if you’re not too tired. I want to go to the Hollow and chisel the markings into the wall before the wind can shear it off the shale.”

“We can walk through the next in-between point to get to the Hollow,” Ronan suggests. “It’s probably the shortest path.”

“No, because once I see the problems there, I won’t want to leave until we fix them. We have to go as fast as we can, because we have a limited window, but each time we do this it uses up some of our energy. Even as strong as we are here, we only have so much energy to give. We go back through the Copse and down the path and circle around. But Ronan, dream of this place tonight if you can. Dream the new trees. The dreaming tree is a lot less powerful if it has to give up part of its resources to maintain the ecosystem of the Clearing, and we’ve connected it to the Copse, and I don’t want that thing bleeding off energy from it if we can stop it. It’s a hungry thing.” 

“I thought I didn’t have to try to dream of these places to get them to seed and then garden,” Ronan says.

“You don’t normally, and it would probably be fine if you didn’t dream of this one either, but I’d feel better about it if you’d try.” Adam sounds tired, and there are dark crescents under his eyes. He hasn’t looked so tired since school had ended and he’d quit the job at the factory.

“I’ll try,” Ronan agrees, without mentioning that he would try anything Adam asked of him that might help ease that look off of his face.

\--

The next morning, Adam’s shitty little car pulls up next to the BMW in the driveway of the Barns, crammed full of all of Adam’s worldly possessions, and Ronan couldn’t be more delighted. They spend the morning picking out one of the guest rooms for Adam and getting his shit moved into it, and Adam doesn’t seem to know what to do with all his ad hoc furniture when the guest room has all the real pieces of furniture in it, instead of cardboard boxes and rubber bins that he used for a dresser or a bedside table or a desk. Ronan tells him to leave it in a pile in the yard and they’ll burn it later, and Adam shakes his head and loads what he doesn’t need back into his car, maybe thinking to donate it, maybe thinking to take it with him to Stanford, how the hell should Ronan know?

Ronan makes them bacon and eggs and toast for a breakfast that is almost lunch by the time they get to it, and he tells Adam about dreaming of the Clearing, trying to explain to Adam that exact slanting golden color of light that would stream through the trees at the right time of day before Adam reminds him that he remembers that light, he’d been there when the Clearing was really a clearing. They wash the dishes together, elbows bumping amicably as Adam washes and Ronan dries and puts away, since he knows where everything goes.

It’s early afternoon by the time they leave the house, and Adam has added a bag full of rocks from the gardening center to the Cabeswater repair kit. They decide to go by way of the Copse, both because Adam wants to check on it to make sure the dreaming tree isn’t causing it any damage, and because Ronan wants to see what has happened to the strips of bark that Adam had used to make a path between the two places. Besides that, the next in-between place Ronon had dreamed had been headed in that direction, the one that they should be able to connect up to the Hollow. Ronon makes sure Adam wears his steel toed boots, which aren’t as good as hiking boots, but are broken in well, at least, with as much time as Adam had spent in them, so they should be okay for the ground they’ll need to cover.

There is no chance of Ronan missing the path to the Copse this time, because all the bushes Ronan had rolled down the hill have remade themselves into a low ground covering of ivy that coats the entire incline. From a third of the way up the path, Ronan can see the tops of the tallest of the oaks, and from halfway up he can hear them whispering to him, _Grata domum, Greywaren, Magus,_ : ‘Welcome home.’ 

Adam hears them, too, and smiles a little at Ronan’s expression. “You made this place, you recreated it, in a very real sense it’s your home. All of the parts that we remake with our hands will be home for us.”

The acorns Adam had planted have grown into not quite mature trees, but they’re a little more spread out than the original Copse, which has spread its way out on the sides a little more. The blackberry bushes don’t look much different, but the ferns and daylilies have swallowed up some more territory, more, Ronan thinks, than they had cleared, which means that the ferns had swallowed some of the bushes. He doesn’t know why this makes his heart soar, only that it does, that what they have made is growing on its own now, and Adam only pauses to draw a single card.

The Sun.

By now, even Ronan recognizes that this card means that the place it applies to can tend to itself now, doesn’t need their direct attention except occasionally, just to make sure things are still going right. The butterflies hover ecstatically over the ferns and daylilies, and the blackberries taste perfectly ripe, like you get them over perhaps ten days of summer.

“This is going to be a pocket of summer,” Adam tells him, surveying the place with a pleased expression. He takes a handful of the gardening pebbles out of the bag he’d lugged up here and stacks them into a tiny wall between the oaks and the blackberry bushes.

“Why wall it off?” Ronan asks, and Adam gives him a perplexed look.

“I’m not. It’s a bench. Or it will be, next time we come this way.” Adam throws a look over his shoulder. “Don’t make it into a wall just to be a dick, Ronan,” he says, lips quirked into a smile. 

“This part mostly happens without my input, so if it ends up a wall, you can’t blame me,” Ronan says, but feels his own lips twitching in response.

“It’s a bench. I can feel the shape of it wanting to be here,” Adam says, and while he’s still smiling, his eyes are serious. “You create, but I envision, and even that’s not really right. I don’t pick out what I want to have here or there. I just feel what should be there, and I make a marker for it, so that when you create, when you dream, you feel my marker and make it into what I felt should be there already.” Adam stands up from in front of his tiny pile of stones, and makes an ‘after you’ kind of gesture. “I know you wanted to see what the path would be.”

Ronan does.

The path begins at the demarcation between the blackberry bushes and the ferns and daylilies, and is a low wooden fence. Not just a knob of wood, either, but a fence that looks like it was put together not by men, but by some kind of tiny woodland sprite or fairy. It’s only a foot or so tall, so Ronon has to practically lie down on his belly to really examine it. It’s got swirls and curlicues and spirals worked into the wood, not just on the surface, but into the wood, so that if you look through it at any point, you can see the opening on the other side. Ronon complains about it being a foot tall, but Adam says, “All we need is a clear path, it doesn’t have to be anything special, just a way to mark off space, and even then the path is mostly metaphysical,” though Ronan thinks that the fence _is_ special; it’s beautiful and airy looking, and he wonders if he tried to dream of it on purpose, if he’d ruin it, or if he could make it grow taller. The ground between the two lines of the path is perfectly flat and level, made of rich soil just barely covered over by a thin layer of grass, so you don’t get your shoes dirty walking on it. Ronan watches the grass spring back up into a perfectly level carpet behind them once their weight leaves the ground, so that they leave no tracks. It’s a pleasant walk from the Copse to their Clearing, and it really is a clearing again.

Adam’s double row of acorns can’t explain the explosion of maple and oak and elm trees that have grown to full maturity overnight. The stream is wider and deeper, and still filled with fish. The dreaming tree looks as it has always looked, but between the trees where there had been tiny red buds of flowers created by their spilled blood are bright red poppies blooming everywhere under the spreading boughs of the trees. The light slants golden through the tree branches in just the way that Ronan remembers it, and the prickly little shrubs have been pushed back at least a quarter of a mile from the stream by the explosive growth of the new trees. Adam chooses a single card.

The Sun.

He tucks his deck away, his face dreamy and happy.

The trees whisper, _Greywaren, Magus_ , over and over again, and rustle in what Ronan interprets as a happy manner. They sit on the banks of the stream and trail their hands in the water, and Ronan doesn’t feel that deep beat of life-power-magic that had been Cabeswater, but he feels it a little, more like a tingling across his skin than a thrumming through his bones, but he can feel that they have changed this place, that they have taken the little bit of what was left of Cabeswater here and made it into more. Not necessarily more _Cabeswater_ , but more magic, and Adam and the Fox Way women all seem to agree that Cabeswater will be attracted to the energy they create, even if that energy isn’t exactly like what Cabeswater’s had been.

He looks up from the stream and sees Adam watching him, his eyes swimming with some deep emotion that Ronan can’t define.

“What was wrong here yesterday, might be a little bit right here today,” Adam says, and gets up to his knees to crawl over to where Ronan is half lying, propped up on one elbow, one hand still dangling into the stream.

He has it in mind to ask what Adam means, but Adam doesn’t give him the chance. He leans in and presses his lips carefully to Ronan’s, and Ronan goes still all over while his whole body seems to tingle. Adam pulls back for a moment, looking down at Ronan, and then Ronan reaches up for him and pulls him back down, this time their mouths slightly open, as though they had both been caught in the middle of a word. Adam makes a low, throaty sound that makes Ronan instantly hard in his jeans, and without even thinking about it, Ronan slips his tongue between Adam’s slightly parted lips. Adam’s lips part further and Ronan, all too aware that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, and only okay with that because he’s almost sure that Adam doesn’t really know either, slides his tongue along Adam’s tongue. Adam gives a little jerk of surprise, and then he curls his tongue a little so that it presses against Ronan’s in turn, and this time it’s Ronan who makes a low, rough sound, and they pull apart at the same time.

The trees are crackling with their names, _Greywaren, Magus,_ and they both look up into the rustling branches and Ronan says gruffly, “I’m not sure how I feel about doing this with our own cheering section,” and Adam dissolves into laughter, leaning into Ronan’s side until they’re pressed together unevenly, Adam’s chest against Ronan’s thigh and belly, and Ronan takes the opportunity to run his fingers through Adam’s light brown hair just to feel the silky texture of it. Adam’s laughter drifts away, and he’s looking at Ronan again with that same unfathomable expression in his eyes. 

“If we get a move on, we might be able to connect this place to the next, and that place to the Hollow before it gets too late in the day,” Adam says, a little breathlessly, and Ronan feels himself smirking a little but can’t help it, even when Adam’s cheeks grow faintly pink. Adam shifts a little, so that he’s leaning a little more upright against Ronan’s thigh, and Ronan sees that his jeans are just tight enough to reveal that he had not been unaffected by the kiss.

Ronan would rather just stay in the clearing and kiss until their lips become chapped, in spite of having their own cheering section, but he heaves himself up into a sitting position, which spills Adam, unprepared, over onto his side.

“You’re such a shit, Lynch,” Adam says, but he’s still smiling. 

They get to their feet, and Adam asks, “How far to the next place, do you think?”

“About three quarters of a mile, but it’s upsy,” Ronan warns. 

“Upsy,” Adam repeats, his lips quirking into a grin, and Ronan scowls at him. 

“It’s an upward trek, is what I mean to say,” Ronan says with as much dignity as he can muster.

Adam digs in the Cabeswater repair kit and comes out with his bag of gardening pebbles. “Here, put some of these in your pockets,” he says, which Ronan does quickly, and hopefully without giving Adam a chance to look at his groin too closely. 

“What am I supposed to do with them?” Ronan asks.

“We’ll use them to make a path,” Adam says. “I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have much in the Clearing to use to make a path to the next Cabeswater node, and so I figured I should bring something along to use. I wanted to get bigger ones, but I didn’t want to carry them all this way, when I was pretty sure that small ones would do just as well.”

“Do you think if I deliberately dream of the path between the Copse and here, I could make that wall taller?” he asks.

Adam shrugs. “Does it need to be taller?” he asks.

“Probably not, but it’s so… so artful that it’s a shame that you practically have to lay down on your belly to get a good look at all the spirals and swoops and swirls,” Ronan admits. 

“I doubt it could hurt to try,” Adam says, filling his own pockets with rocks. “I mean, if you tried and it didn’t work, I don’t think it would damage what is there already.” He shrugs. “Try it and find out,” he says, apparently unworried. “It would look nicer if it were taller. I just didn’t have that much material to work with.” Adam gives him a broad smile. “I told you I could make a path with those strips of bark. When are you going to learn that I’m the Magician?”

“Don’t get cocky, Parrish,” Ronan snaps. “If I’ve got it figured out how this works right, it takes both of us to really make anything real.”

The trek to the next node is indeed ‘upsy.’ It’s almost as if they climb up out of the Clearing on the eastern edge of the trees, and are immediately on a rather narrow, rocky ledge. Adam sways on his feet in surprise, and Ronan tangles his fingers in his shirt and holds on. “I told you it was an upward trek,” Ronan says, but his heart is pounding in his throat with fear. “Watch the fuck where you’re walking or I’ll have to scrape you off this fucking cliff face.”.

Normally, Adam would have snapped some sort of defense to that, but he has one hand tightly closed around the wrist of the hand Ronan has twisted in his shirt, and Ronan sees how abruptly pale he is. 

“This is the narrowest part,” Ronan reassures him. “It’s still a climb uphill from here, but it gets wider once we get around that bend up there. Can you make it that far?”

“Yeah, I just. Heights aren’t great for me,” Adam admits, and visibly pulls himself together. It’s one of the things Ronan likes about Adam. Even if you take him by surprise, he can always pull himself back together so quickly that it’s hard to remember that he was ever surprised to begin with. “Sprinkle the pebbles on the outside of the path,” he says. “I don’t think we need any for the cliff face side.”

“Yeah, okay,” Ronan says, and reaches for a handful of pebbles to sprinkle along the drop off side of the climb. “Will this get wider when the path is here?” he asks.

“I sure as shit hope so,” Adam says feelingly, but then adds, “But even if it doesn’t, it should give us something to grab onto when we’re walking along this section of the path.” They begin to make their way carefully along the ledge, which is about two and a half feet wide, Ronan making sure his pebbles don’t fall down the side when he bends to drop a handful every foot or so. Once they get around the bend in the cliff face, the path widens out to four feet, and Adam starts putting down his own share of the pebbles, no longer looking quite so pale. Luckily, that while the ledge is high and in some places narrow, the footing is stable, there’s no scree underfoot that might make them slide. After half a mile or so, the path starts to level off and then to actually cant slightly downward, and they have to place their pebbles carefully again so they don’t roll down the slope.

The ledge lets out into a dense grove of willows surrounding a small, clear pond. Birds explode out of the trees as Adam and Ronan step into the grove, and the Willows sigh out, _Festina. Non multum temporis supererat._ Adam and Ronan exchange alarmed looks, the trees have never been quite so aware of something being amiss in these pockets of Cabeswater, but these had said: _Hurry. There’s not much time left._

Adam drops down to his knees beside the pond and shuffles his cards and lays out three.

The Hierophant. The Devil. The Hermit.

“Spirituality,” Adam says briefly. “Bondage or restraint, often metaphorical. And another kind of spirituality, the kind where you make the journey to Mecca or another significantly spiritual place.” His brow furrows, puzzled. “Help me look around this place, see if you can see anything that seems off.”

“You mean other than all the fucking birds?” Ronan says, as the birds are indeed returning, settling back into the tops of the branches and sending the tendrils of the branches down to float on top of the water.

Adam looks up at them sharply, but they aren’t any particular kind of birds as far as Ronan can tell. In fact. “Those aren’t birds,” Adam says, even as Ronan is opening his mouth to say the same thing. They are shadows that flap and caw like birds, but they aren’t actually birds.

Adam pulls a handful of pebbles from his pocket and starts chucking them at the birds, and for a long moment, Ronan is amazed. Adam has, for one thing, phenomenal aim. Every rock he throws hits a shadow, and as the rocks soar into their upward trajectory, they become little streaks of light, like comets. When they strike one of the shadows it shrieks and disintegrates into flecks of ash. Ronan pulls out his own handful of pebbles and begins pegging them at the bird-shadows. His aim isn’t as good as Adam’s is, but he hits more than he misses. He isn’t sure how long the fight goes on. 

And a fight is what it feels like, not like two boys throwing pebbles at a flock of birds, but like they are using their fists on an opponent, each throw takes effort and they are both sweaty and breathing hard within just a minute. The shadow-things start to try diving down on them, and Adam screams (unnecessarily) “Don’t let them touch you!” and then Ronan is pegging stones at the shadow-things still in the trees, but Adam is protecting them both from diving shadow-things, they do it without having to talk about it, as if they both understand their strengths and know exactly what the other will do. 

One of the shadow-things manages to get close enough to Adam to scrape a tendril of shadow that looks like a talon along his arm, before Adam slaps it away with a pebble that is glowing in his hand like a tiny sun, and Ronan sees that Adam’s arm is sliced open and dripping black ichor from the wound. Without knowing how he knows what to do, Ronon drops all his stones and hurtles to Adam’s side, shouting, “Placere auxilium,” to the trees, ‘Please heal him,’ and a willow frond drops out of a tree and into his hands, and he wraps the soft, fragile material that doesn’t feel anything like a tree branch, around Adam’s arm. It clings to the wound, and Ronan can feel the magic of it doing something, though he doesn’t know what, can only hope it’s enough, and Adam never stops throwing stones at the shadow-things. 

“Find the source, it will be somewhere in the pond,” Adam shouts, his face flushed with exertion, his arm rising and falling as he throws stones, and Ronan wades into the pond, not knowing what he’s looking for, but sure he’ll know it when he finds it, and there it is, a line of black across the water, looking a little like a streak of oil marring the otherwise perfect cerulean of the pond. Ronan rips off his shirt and does his best to make a net of it, makes a net of it in _his mind_ , and he scoops up the streak of black sludge and it fights him, it struggles like an eel, but Ronan drags it to the shore and throws it onto the ground. Adam bombards it with rocks, there is no other word for it, he’s throwing ten and twelve at a time, each of them separating into tiny sun-like comets and they sizzle as they strike the sludge, still wrapped up in Ronan’s shirt, and if the shadows had shrieked, this thing does something even worse, something Ronan doesn’t even have a word for, as Adam kills it with pebbles he’d bought in the gardening center at Wal-Mart. It makes a sound that makes Ronan’s eyes feel like they’re going to start bleeding, and when it finally stops, Ronan thinks he’s never been so grateful for a sound to have ended in his entire life. Adam is still pelting rocks at shadow-things, but they are fewer and fewer now, and Ronan begins to help him, and together they pick off the rest of them, their final shrieks almost musical compared to the sound of the sludge-things cries.

_Gratias tibi prope labefactata iam essemus, diutius resisti non posset,_ the willows whisper, sounding as exhausted as Adam and Ronan, who have both collapsed to the ground and are breathing like cardiac arrest victims, great whooping inhalations of air. Ronan recovers first -- Adam had, after all, done the hardest parts of the fighting -- and crawls over to Adam to check on his arm. The willow frond that feels like silk and satin under his fingers peels back from the wound the shadow-thing had left on Adam’s arm, and there is a fresh, puckered pink scar there, but it looks clean, it doesn’t feel as though there is any shadow left in it, and Adam stares up at him, exhausted, but smiles faintly.

“I’m alright. It’s alright. The trees leached the poison out of the cut. What did they say? I was breathing too hard to make it out.”

“They said: ‘Thank you, we were nearly gone, and could not have stood against them much longer,’” Ronan says, and falls back down on his back, exhausted by the fight, terrified at seeing that scar on Adam’s arm, and just grateful that it’s over.

“Usquequo tu pugnaretur?” Adam pants out with his atrocious phrasing, ‘How long have you been fighting?’ and the trees murmur and whisper amongst themselves for a long several seconds, before finally answering.

_Quoniam vastator tetigit lucum._

“‘Since the unmaker touched the Grove,’” Ronan translates, because Adam gives him a kind of helpless look, like maybe Latin is a little beyond him, as far as translating an answer back in it, anyway. “I think they mean the demon,” Ronan says. “It must have barely brushed across it not to have destroyed the Grove completely, to have given the trees a chance to fight off its taint for this long.”

_Venerit in aquis, ignorat pacem,_ the trees invite, and Adam merely nods that he had understood the invitation, pausing to drag his tarot deck out of his back pocket and leave it on the dry ground in its case. Still, Ronan has to climb unsteadily to his feet and then drag Adam to his by main strength, but they wade into the water of the pond, and as the trees had said, for a while, all is peace.

“Don’t let it give us back all of its strength,” Adam whispers to Ronan, and Ronan translates it for the trees, but the trees merely respond that there is a wellspring under the pond, and it will provide them all with enough strength.

“A wellspring,” Adam repeats thoughtfully. “I wonder if that’s what makes them all more able to communicate concepts so much more clearly than the other trees. Or maybe it was just the constant attack. It had to hold itself together more than the other parts of Cabeswater we’ve found.”

Ronan struggles through trying to phrase that into a question that the trees can understand, saying it several times in different ways, before the trees finally answer, _Fontes sunt corda Cabeswater._

“‘The wellsprings are the hearts of Cabeswater,’” Adam muses. “I think...I think this place remembers being part of Cabeswater. The others… they only know what they are now, but I think this place remembers being a part of something bigger.”

Ronan again struggles through several iterations of the question in Latin before the trees answer.

_Nos sunt a parte Cabeswater. Greywaren et mago, et iterum faciens ad locum Cabeswater. Sententia operis sumus et nos durior pugna, ut cum nos hic esse volumus._

“I can’t get all of that,” Adam says, sounding weary now, but no longer exhausted. Ronan is feeling better, too. 

“I’m not sure I got it all just right, but I think it was: ‘We are still a part of Cabeswater. The Greywaren and the Magician are making a place for Cabeswater to be again. We have been feeling your work, and it made us fight harder, so that we would still be here when you found us.’” Ronan drags himself out of the water, his jeans wet and heavy, but feeling almost human again. “I may have gotten some of it wrong. Or they may have not really understood the question. The thing about talking to trees is that they don’t share a lot of concepts with human beings. But I think that’s more or less what they said.”

Adam climbs out of the pool to lie next to Ronan. He holds up his arm and looks at the angry red scar. “I knew we couldn’t let them touch us, but I didn’t know how bad it would be if they did. I can’t believe the Grove lasted as long as it did. And that thing that you pulled out, the nest or whatever it was, the way it screamed. It felt like it was making my eyes bleed.”

“Man, you were fucking magnificent,” Ronan says with honest admiration. “I don’t think you missed even a single throw.”

Adam turns his face toward Ronan, flushed and pleased looking. “I’m killer at darts,” he says, and they both start to laugh, a pleasant quasi-hysteria that lasts for a few minutes, while the trees whisper their names and ‘thank you,’ over and over again.

Adam eventually gets up and goes back to his deck, shuffles them, and deals out three more cards.

The Hierophant. The Hermit. The Sun.

He shuffles them again and pulls out a single card.

The Sun.

He shuffles them again and pulls out a single card.

The Sun.

“This place,” Adam says finally. “Its wellspring… it will make everything else stronger. It will give freely of its power, I can sense that about it. It will make everything we can connect it to stronger. Thank God we got here in time, but even so, thank God we didn’t try to come here yesterday, after bleeding so much of our animus into the Clearing. If we had come here weakened, we would have died, and so would the Grove.”

Adam puts his cards into their case, but tucks the case into the Cabeswater repair kit, since his jeans are soaked. “Can you ask it if there is anything else it needs from us. If we can help its wellspring grow stronger?” Adam asks Ronan.

“ _Custodi opus._ ” Keep working. 

Adam walks around the Grove several times, checking for any more of the shadow-things, and looking also, for the prickly bushes that had so far surrounded all of the parts of Cabeswater that they had found, but there are none here. The Grove rests in a grotto surrounded on almost all sides by rock. There is only one path out of it, other than the one they had come by, and it leads into one of Henrietta’s omnipresent fields. The grotto isn’t that deep, maybe twenty feet of stone surrounding it, but it’s deep enough that Ronan is glad that there is another path out of it, otherwise he isn’t sure how they’d ever manage to connect it to the Hollow.

“Lorem curando magus,” Ronon tells the Grove: _Thank you for healing the Magician_ , when they finally feel like they can make the trip from here to the Hollow, connecting all of their places together, now, in a zigzagging line.

_Et est in manibus nostris. Et est oculis. Te somnia nostra,_ the trees whisper.

“‘I am their hands. I am their eyes. You are their dreams,’” Adam says, his eyes dreaming again. “This place remembers the original bargain. This place still is a part of Cabeswater, somehow. I don’t know if that really helps us, but I feel like it can’t hurt.” He looks at Ronan. “How far from here to the Hollow?”

“Less than half a mile,” Ronan says. “Depending on how much the Hollow has grown, maybe way less. Do we have enough stones left to make a trail?”

“Yeah,” Adam says. “We’ll only need to scatter a few every couple of feet or so.” He looks at Ronan. “Am I the only one that can hardly believe that just happened?” he asks.

Ronan shakes his head, but he smirks. “I’m soaking wet and you incinerated my shirt with your flaming comet stones, so it better have just happened.” 

“Sorry if my destroying the source of evil in this place is causing you the vast inconvenience of having to go without a shirt,” Adam says, grinning.

“You should be,” Ronan says peevishly. “I’m pretty sure I only have fifteen or twenty others.”

Adam snorts, and heads for the field side opening in the grotto. Ronan follows, feeling a little pang at leaving the Grove behind. He hadn’t realized he had missed talking to trees that remembered more than just their names. Well, he can come back and visit. And if these places connect up the way that Adam seems to think that they will, maybe the other trees will pick up some more language.

The Hollow is barely a quarter of a mile from the Grove. It has spread, and has done so beautifully since the last time they had seen it. The pond is a third again as large, and the beeches have pushed back the prickly bushes, but for some reason, only the beeches have spread. The oaks and poplars have grown, and the beeches have grown too, but the beeches are the trees that are pushing the Hollow out wider. The small rivulet that had spilled it’s way over the piece of rose quartz they had placed in the pond has become a steady waterfall, feeding a stream that stretches outside the Hollow, and Ronan thinks the stream is also pushing the prickly bushes and scrub back. They follow the stream down into a new stand of young spruce trees that have sprung up on either side of the bank, but once they move out from under the spruces, the stream quickly dwindles away into a mere rivulet again. But it had barely been a rivulet when it had started at the waterfall, so Ronan doesn’t let it disappoint him. It’s still growing. Just more slowly, now that they haven’t been visiting it every day.

“How many more places do we know about right now?” Adam asks.

“Three from the psychics, and one I dreamed,” Ronan says.

“I have to work at Boyd’s tomorrow,” Adam says, his tone a little flat, as though he’s expecting some sort of comment or argument from Ronan.

Ronan, who had been preparing just such an argument, hears that tone, and looks at Adam, who has dark crescents beneath his eyes again. “Okay,” he says simply. “All day or what?”

“From ten to five,” Adam says cautiously.

“It’s probably good for us to take a day off after that fight anyway,” Ronan says. “You said yourself that we only have so much energy to give, and we’ve been working hard. Do you want to pick up Nino’s for dinner?”

“Sure,” Adam says, sounding a little baffled, but also a little pleased.

They have to walk all the way back to the car, which is at the beginning of their little circuit and a good five miles away, but they do so in companionable, if exhausted, silence.

By the time they get home, dusk is just closing in. Ronan throws together a couple of sandwiches for each of them, which they inhale ravenously. After they finish eating, they sit on the couch and start to watch a movie, something mindless that they’ve both seen before. 

Ronan wakes up with Adam’s back resting against his chest sometime after the movie has ended, and gently wakes an extremely groggy Adam and walks him to the door of his new bedroom, because he’s not sure Adam will be able to remember the way on his own. He leaves the bathroom light on, so that if Adam has to get up in the night, he won’t be in total darkness, and he goes to bed in his own bed down the hall. He dreams about all their places, but doesn’t try to locate any new ones yet. They still have four to deal with, and his dreams about their existing places make him feel something like contentment.

\--

Ronan wakes up early to make Adam breakfast before he has to go to work, and Adam, sleepy-eyed and tousle-haired, blushes furiously at what Ronan had meant mostly as an innocent thing-you-do-for-a-friend gesture. He eats and showers and comes out clad in faded old coveralls that should make him look bad because _nobody_ looks good in coveralls, but somehow make him look competent and tidy instead.

On his way out the door, he says to Ronan, “I’m not telling you not to go to any of our places today, but I am telling you that I think it would be a lot more dangerous for either of us to go there alone than it will ever be for us to go together.”

Ronan has already figured this out, and merely says, “I hadn’t planned on it. I thought I might try to make you a separate place today, a new place, to see if you can do anything there. The psychics suggested it might be a good test, and I’m interested in seeing if I can do it. I’ll do it on the Barns property, so nobody can ever stumble onto it.”

Adam’s face has lightened with interest. “Sounds entertaining,” he says, and sounds a lot like he wishes he could stick around and watch, even though that only actually involves watching Ronan sleep. “I’ll be back by six with Nino’s.”

Ronan spends the morning trying to think up something especially interesting for Adam, and then gives it up as a lost cause, because what they’re doing right now is all so interesting, that anything else is likely to pale in comparison. He drowses on the couch after lunch, and when he finally drops off to sleep in order to dream-build, he finds himself waking up approximately every fifteen minutes as what he’s trying to build collapses in on itself. He figures that without Cabeswater as a power source, he doesn’t have the energy to create a place out of nothing and maintain it, which is a little depressing, but is also somewhat reassuring, because it means that the things they are building together really are parts of Cabeswater that didn’t vanish with the rest of it, not just things they are somehow making out of nothing but wishful thinking.

He does a little maintenance around the house, which mostly doesn’t need much, as it is stocked with dream things that don’t break down, but every now and again he’ll find a loose hinge on a cupboard door, or something else relatively minor, and he keeps a list of these things to do when he’s bored and feels like working with his hands. The day without Adam is not great, but it isn’t horrible, either, partly because he knows that Adam is coming back here tonight, and not back to his shithole apartment.

He does take the time to dream of the fence between the Copse and the Clearing, because it can’t hurt, at least according to Adam, and it might end up being as amazing as he can visualize it in his head, and then also the wall on the path that leads from the Clearing to the Grove, just to make sure it’s tall enough to use as a banister. He won’t soon forget catching Adam by the shirt to help him keep his balance on the narrow ledge that leads out of the Clearing.

He spends the last hour or so that Adam is gone sketching out a little map of their places, along with the places he knows they haven’t got to yet from his dream, and with a little more effort, general areas in which the psychics scryed areas might lie. He thinks about connecting the valley with that ash tree in it to the rest of their ‘gardens,’ but something makes him think that there is only one way in or out of that valley, and that it would be pointless to connect it. Also, if it’s a tree-light, and she’s sleeping and doesn’t know Cabeswater has been unmade, he doesn’t want them connecting her to their little gardens and having their activity in them waking her up to find herself all alone in the world. Better if they visit her valley from time to time, just to check and see that things are still alright with her, but otherwise leave her alone. He wonders about somehow connecting the Hollow to the Copse from the other direction, headed out of the Hollow from the southern side of it, but there is just too much space between them. The next time he tries to dream up in-between places, he’ll try to make them in-between the Hollow and the Copse in a more southwesterly curve.

At least one of Maura’s is close to an in-between space between the two. Calla’s seems to be an outlier, something fairly close to the old church that they had buried Noah’s bones in. It’s not far, he thinks, from the Clearing, as the crow flies. As far as what that means in real distance, there isn’t really any way to know. Adam’s scried place seems like it also might be close to the Clearing, but Adam’s directions aren’t as good as the psychics had been, maybe just because he hasn’t had as much practice. Their whole little map is a zigzag line of interconnected points, but all strung out in a line. Ronan feels like they need a circle to draw Cabeswater back onto the ley line, a circle or a… a hole. Like something you could fit a puzzle piece into. He doesn’t know if that’s a real hunch, or if it’s just something his brain came up with because it wants to fill the empty spaces between the Copse and the Hollow. He reminds himself to ask Adam what he thinks when he gets home.

Adam gets home just before six with an El Grande size Nino’s pizza, which is one size up from a large, because for whatever reason, Nino’s couldn’t just put an Extra Large Pizza on their menu. Ronan objects because the name crosses cultural boundaries, they aren’t ordering burritos. No one else has ever come down on his side in this argument. 

Ronan confesses his failures in dream space creation over consolation pizza, but Adam seems almost as excited about his failure as he might have been about a success. He agrees with Ronan’s suspicion that his failure is _because_ what they are finding really are bits of Cabeswater that got left behind, and further hypothesizes that if Ronan were to try to create a space directly on the ley line, tapping directly into it’s power, he’d probably be successful. They agree that at some point, they will try something to that effect, and speculate about the Hollow, which actually does cross the ley line directly. Maybe that’s the one Ronon was able to stumble across first because it was more stable due to its location on the ley line.

Adam is off for the next two days, so they will have plenty of time to track down their four points as yet undiscovered that they are aware of. Adam looks at Ronan’s map and listens to his circle theory with interest, his gaze going over thoughtful as Ronan tries to talk out why the circle, or puzzle piece, theory feels right to him. In the end, Adam doesn’t disagree, but doesn’t entirely agree either. He has a ‘more is better’ theory, as in, the more nodes they can find and cause to seed and garden, the more energy they are creating, and thus the more strongly Cabeswater would be pulled toward this energy to manifest itself. Ronan doesn’t necessarily disagree with this theory either, and they both freely admit that both of their theories are made with entirely too little fact and too much wishful thinking.

After dinner, they make out. 

Actually, they stretch out on the couch to watch a movie, and Adam slides himself fairly smoothly under Ronan’s arm, without making any kind of a big deal about it, so Ronan lets him and tries to keep his body loose and relaxed so that Adam can’t feel how Adam touching Ronan affects him; they watch for a while, and Adam turns his face and kisses the corner of Ronan’s mouth. Ronan turns to meet the kiss straight on, and they end up with Adam sprawled partly across Ronon’s lap, just kissing and touching each other in strictly safe for all audiences places, but Ronon is glad to be doing it in spite of that, and glad that Adam had kissed him, because he isn’t sure if he would have known how to go about starting a make out session with Adam. They kiss until their lips are tender and their tongues are familiar with the shapes of each other’s mouths, and might have kissed for longer except that Adam’s new phone rings, and Adam feels like he has to answer it even though he doesn’t know the number on the display (since his only contact is Ronan), and it turns out to be Blue, who is angry to have found out from her mother that Adam now has a cell phone.

Adam tries to argue that he’s only had it for a couple of days and that he doesn’t have any of their numbers, but Blue’s mother had apparently also told her that Adam and Ronan had been to Fox Way since The Purchase, so Blue knows he could have gotten their contact information from Ronan. This leads to a confession, from Adam, that he’s staying at the Barns working on a project with Ronan (Ronan actually slaps himself in the forehead, and not for comedic effect), because then Blue won’t rest until she knows what it is they’re working on together, and Adam, looking helpless to do otherwise, tries to explain it to her. Ronan gets up and grumpily gets himself another slice of pizza, since this is clearly going to take some time, and Ronan will tell Adam later that things like this are exactly why he doesn’t answer his phone most of the time.

Blue is as excited about this project as one would expect her to be, and is only pissed off that no one had called her and told her it was happening. Adam tries to explain that at first it was because they didn’t really know what they were doing, and then it was because it became very engrossing, and Adam wasn’t used to having a cell phone and being able to call and tell his friends about exciting news, but mostly ends up just apologizing a lot, and promising to get her contact information from Ronan, and Gansey’s, too, and Cheng’s. Blue states she’s tempted to come back and try to help except that she’s already had it explained to her by two different psychics why her coming back to help with this particular adventure could endanger Blue’s life. Adam tries to hand the phone off to Ronan at one point, and Ronan emphatically shakes his head and stuffs a huge bite of pizza into his mouth, because he knows that Blue just wants to scold Ronan live and in person, and that she won’t be able to do it on his own phone because Ronan simply won’t answer it. Eventually the conversation winds down, and Adam explains to her the number of minutes he gets per month with his contract, and she seems to accept that as a good enough reason to end the call, if she wants to talk to Adam again at all that month. Adam tells her that he can get unlimited texts, so Ronan expects that Blue will use that method to communicate with Adam for the most part in between calls. Adam promises to call her if any new developments take place, promises her again to get their contact information from Ronan, and then finally ends the call.

“And you wanted to date her,” Ronan sneers, once Adam has escaped the conversation.

Adam snaps, “Yeah, because you’re so much easier to get along with, Lynch,” and then immediately looks sorry. “That wasn’t fair, we’ve been getting along great since school ended,” he says, his brows drawn down into contrite angles.

“We’ve always gotten along as long as it was just the two of us,” Ronan says honestly.

“I know,” Adam says softly, his brows still contrite. “When I wasn’t being stupid and you weren’t being a dick.” 

Ronan barks out a laugh, but he’d stand by that statement to the end. As long as it had only been Ronan and Adam, they had never fought. It wasn’t until other people’s messy feelings and personalities tangled up with theirs that they hadn’t gotten along. At least, once Ronan had accepted Adam as a part of their group of friends and had made an effort to be Adam’s friend.

“Ronan?” Adam asks, uncharacteristically hesitantly. “Do you want to go to bed with me?”

Caught off guard, Ronan says, “Yes,” with perfect honesty. Then he amends it to, “What, right now?” 

Adam’s blush is a fearsome thing. “I mean, just to sleep. Do you want to sleep in my bed with me tonight?”

“Yes,” Ronan says at once. Then, “Why?”

“Because I want you near me, but I don’t know how to do much of anything else, not that I’m sure I’m even ready to do much else, but. I’d like to have you near me when I’m asleep.” Adam is still flushing, and Ronan strokes a hand down his arm, and when that doesn’t seem like it’s quite enough, lays the palm of his hand along one side of Adam’s neck.

“Yes, I’d like to sleep with you, Parrish,” he says quietly, and Adam’s face slowly resumes it’s normal color. “Now?” Ronan asks.

“Yeah, I’m tired, and we’ve got work to do tomorrow. But first give me everyone’s contact information that you have, so that I don’t earn another scolding from Blue.”

Ronan laughs, but digs around until he finds his phone, and begins reading off the contact information for everyone else they mutually know, including Matthew, so it’s another hour or so before they go to bed. Adam brushes his teeth in the bathroom, and then strips down to boxer briefs and a white t-shirt. “Is this okay?” he asks.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” Ronan agrees, trying to keep his eyes from lingering on the long, lean muscles of Adam’s legs as he strips down to boxers and leaves his tank top on. “Okay?”

Adam smiles tentatively. “I know you don’t sleep in your tank top. You don’t have to leave it on and be uncomfortable all night to protect my modesty.”

Ronan doesn’t argue, just strips off his tank top, and they both climb into Adam’s bed. At first Ronan isn’t sure he’s going to be able to sleep with Adam’s warmth so close to his and the sweet scent of Adam’s shampoo in his nose, but then Adam rolls onto his side and rests his forehead against the biceps of Ronan’s right arm, and Ronan feels him slowly relax into sleep. Feeling Adam fall asleep because he’d just wanted to be near Ronan while Adam was sleeping both sizzles through Ronan and lulls him at the same time. He feels himself drifting off as well, and thinks of Adam’s nerve. Ronan would have never have had the nerve to ask Adam that question, even if he had meant it as innocently as Adam had. Then he is asleep, too. 

\--

They wake up in a tangle of body parts, facing one another with their thighs threaded together, each of them with an arm draped across the other’s waist, and their other arms tucked under each other’s pillows.

Ronan feels Adam wake up and is immediately awake as well, preparing himself for this to go somehow poorly, but Adam just smiles sleepily at him and leans in closer to Ronan, tucking his cheek against Ronan’s bare chest. Ronan can feel that they are both hard by the way their thighs are tangled together, and isn’t sure what to do about it, or if he should do anything. He finds himself smoothing the hand that had been slung across Adam’s waist up and down the strong line of his back, a slow and soothing kind of gesture, even though he’s burning up with want for Adam. He realizes he’s sliding his hand across bare skin, so Adam must have taken his t-shirt off sometime in the middle of the night. Maybe it had been two hot, with both of their bodies heating up the bed.

This goes on for some minutes. 

Eventually, Adam says, “We should get up. We’ve got a lot to get done today.” His warm breath puffs across Ronan’s chest as he speaks. Ronan stops stroking Adam’s back, but doesn’t move his hand entirely away. He slots his fingers between the ridges of Adam’s ribs instead, and finds that his hand fits there perfectly. Finding that out is like dreaming of one of their places; it instantly makes him feel content. It’s such an instantaneous feeling that Ronan feels himself slipping back into sleep, which apparently Adam notices, too, as he slips his hand up to capture Ronan’s hand with his, which halts his slide back into sleep, but doesn’t actually bother him, as Adam twines their fingers together. “I want you, Ronan, but I don’t want to be clumsy about it,” Adam murmurs, his Henrietta accent very strong. 

“We can be clumsy about it together,” Ronan says, and bends down to kiss the top of Adam’s head. “But there’s no hurry.”

“You haven’t…?” Adam asks almost timidly.

“No. I don’t know how to be casual, and that’s all I’ve ever been offered,” Ronan admits. “We can figure it out together, but it doesn’t need to be now. You’re right, we’ve got a lot of work to do today.” Adam tips his head up and kisses Ronan’s chin. 

“Thanks,” he says softly.

“For what?” Ronan asks.

“For being willing to go slow and easy until I feel like I know more of what I’m doing,” Adam says. “I know you like to fling yourself into things recklessly and at breakneck speeds, so thanks for not doing that… with me.”

“It can go as slow or as fast as you want,” Ronan says. “You can change your mind in the middle, if you want to. It’s not all about me.”

Adam chuckles, breathing out little puffs of air against his chest. “It’s good to know I’m involved in there somewhere.”

“Now is not the time to be a dick, Parrish,” Ronan says, but he’s smiling. Even as Adam untangles their thighs and begins to put space between them in the bed, he’s smiling. They climb out of the bed on separate sides, but Ronan no longer thinks that they’re always going to be on separate sides of the bed, and he can wait, maybe even wants to wait a little. To let himself settle into Adam and Adam settle into him, and then maybe, once they get to the point where they can touch each other in PG-13 places, things will speed up a little from there.

Which doesn’t stop Ronan from jerking off in the shower with the memory of how it had felt to have Adam’s hard-on pressed against his thigh.

Adam is already making breakfast when Ronan gets downstairs. He’s found the waffle iron that doesn’t plug into anything, and is experimenting with it a trifle hesitantly, but with his chin cocked a little in determination.

“It works just like a regular waffle iron, except you can immerse the whole thing in water to wash it,” Ronan encourages him, and goes immediately to the coffee maker, which smells of freshly brewed coffee. He pours himself a cup and adds cream from the little pitcher in the fridge that never runs out or goes bad. 

In short order, they both have a stack of waffles slathered in butter and with real maple syrup, and Ronan is almost as interested in watching Adam licking syrup from his fingers as he is in his own waffles. Adam flashes him a little grin from across the table the third or fourth time he catches Ronan watching him which is simultaneously shy and sultry. Ronan wouldn’t have thought you could have combined the two. Apparently, Adam Parrish can, and the combination is devastating on him.

Ronan focuses his attention on his own plate for the rest of the meal.

They decide to concentrate on Ronan’s last dream place first, since it seems to be within a reasonable distance of the Clearing. They drive the BMW through the field on a mostly northwesterly course, and stop when they get to the scrubby land that it gets hard to drive over. They wade through the scrub for half a mile or so, and then come to the ever present patches of prickly bushes, which snag at their jeans and their hands as they make their way through them. Ronan finds the big boulder that he’d kept in his mind as a place marker for the dream, and they circle around it into a deeply shadowed glade of evergreens of every kind, spruce and firs, cypress and junipers and pines, all mixed together in a jumble of fragrant scents. 

_Greywaren, Magus, Te somnia grata in circulum._ The evergreens greet them, and they make their way further into the shadowy glade and find flowers in a ring in the center, flowers surrounding a tall set of standing stones, nothing in the league of stonehenge or anything, but definitely standing stones that look ancient and are overgrown in places by lichen and moss. Ronan can see that the stones are covered in carvings, but most of the symbols are either strange to him or have worn away until they’re mere suggestions on the rock. He hangs back, a little uncertain of entering the ring, but Adam crosses into the ring fearlessly, his gaze bright with something like recognition, Ronan thinks. 

“It’s a dreaming ring,” Adam says, echoing the trees, looking at Ronan like Ronan should know what that means, and then shaking his head a little as if to clear it. “Falling asleep in one is supposed to make help you see the future or the past a little, answer little questions, help you make decisions. See the markings on the stones. They’d be different for a sacrificial ring or a summoning ring. The ones I can make out are all about taking rest and finding ease in your mind. I wonder what would happen to your dreams if you were to fall asleep in one.” Adam sounds like he really wonders that at the same time that he isn’t sure he wants to let it happen. Adam takes out his tarot deck and shuffles it, and lays out three cards.

The Magician. The Chariot. Temperance.

“The Chariot makes the most sense. It means directed energy, energy with a purpose, which is something this ring was made for. Temperance is about balance and about harmony with your surroundings.”

He looks around the dreaming stones, frowning a little, and rubs his thumb absently along his bottom lip. Finally, he says, “Come in here and let me use your lap for a pillow, Ronan, but don’t fall asleep yourself. Probably nothing bad would happen if you did, but this place was called to _my_ attention specifically. Maybe it has something to tell me.”

Ronan crosses into the ring -- he feels a little shiver of gooseflesh ripple across his skin as he passes between two of the stones -- and sits down in the middle, crossing his legs to make a place for Adam to lay his head. Adam lies down in the beaten down dirt, clear of any kind of debris within the circle, and closes his eyes. He says, “This is only a kind of scrying, I think, so if you feel my hands or my face getting cold, wake me up.”

And Adam’s drops into sleep, just like that, so quickly that Ronan himself probably couldn’t have done it faster, so it must be the magic of this place.

The trees outside the circle of stones whisper, _”Magus, Greywaren, de qua nobis,_ ‘Magician, Greywaren, see us,’ and Ronan wonders what it means and if Adam can hear the trees in his sleep, or if it’s Ronan’s attention they are trying to get. Adam’s face is completely tranquil, and there is something different about this than the scrying Ronan had seen them doing at Fox Way. There had clearly been some effort involved in that scrying, and this seems easy in comparison. Before Ronan has even been sitting there long enough to become uncomfortable or to get pins and needles in his legs from the weight of Adam’s head, Adam’s eyes open, and he smiles up at Ronan from upside down.

“We were both right,” Adam says, before Ronan can ask him what he’d dreamed. “It has to be energy, but there also has to be a central focus for it, a ring around which that energy is wound. This place is perfect for it, but we’ll have to move it.”

Ronan stares at him, half hoping he’d heard Adam wrong. “Move it how?” he finally demands.

“We have to… well, you have to go to sleep in the ring, and move it closer to the center of what we’re building. Closer to the Clearing, I think, which is close as we have to a middle of a circle at this point,” Adam says.

“How the hell do I do that?” Ronan demands, his voice a little strident this time, and Adam sits up and turns around to face him, also sitting cross legged. 

“It knows how to be moved, it’s been moved before. But it needs a Greywaren to do it, because it needs the trees to come with it. The trees power the ring. We’ll have to encircle it with something, hem it in with a wall or something, and then all you’ll have to do is go to sleep in it and dream of where you want it to be. We won’t do it yet,” he says, as though to reassure Ronan. “We don’t have enough of a shape to put it in the center of a circle yet, and the circle doesn’t have to be a perfect shape. It just has to be connected on all ends, all the pieces of Cabeswater we’ve found connected together, so that we can walk from one area of it to all the others without ever leaving the path. Moving the Dreaming Ring is the last thing we should do. But Ronan, I promise you, it will be easy. I still have enough rocks left over that we should be able to build a low wall around the trees today, so that when we’re ready to move it, it will move all as one piece.”

Ronan tries to imagine moving something this big, especially with the ring of evergreens around it, to someplace new, and feels like it should be impossible. Adam is already digging in his Cabeswater repair kit for his bag of rocks. 

“We should only need a low wall, but there can’t be any breaks, so we’ll have to keep the rocks close together,” he is saying. 

Ronan tries to think of a way to argue, but thinks again about everything else they’ve been able to do, and he leaves the words in his throat, unspoken, and merely helps Adam surround the evergreens, which circle the Dreaming Ring in an almost perfect circle already, in with stones.

Then Adam leads him back into the ring and settles down with his legs crossed, and says, “Okay, dream them into a wall.”

“What, now?” Ronan asks, a little irritable already at Adam’s easy assumption that he will be able to move this place even a millimeter, and only more irritated that Adam suddenly wants him to sleep now, here, to dream the rocks into a wall around the evergreens. 

_Greywaren experietur quicquam mali tempus intra circulum lapidum,_ the trees whisper. ‘You are safe within the circle of stones.’

“The trees don’t lie any more than you do, and they say you’ll be safe in the circle,” Adam says, giving Ronan a look that is both a little stern and a little pleading. “You will only sleep for a few minutes,” Adam adds, looking up at him hopefully with his blue eyes. “The Dreaming Ring will just… amplify your power a little, and help you focus your dreaming mind, so that you don’t spill your dreams all over the rest of the places we’ve connected, just on the rocks we’ve put down to make a wall.”

“Why does it need a wall? The evergreens already encircle it completely,” Ronan grumbles, but he lays his head down in Adam’s lap.

“Because the evergreens have been fighting back the prickly bushes, but they’re slowly losing. This is a strong place, so it’s kept most of itself intact, but if we build it a wall, the evergreens won’t have to fight anymore to hold onto the ground that they still have.” Adam rubs his hand along Ronon’s buzzed head and smiles down at him. “Will you trust me?” he asks, and of course there is nothing Ronan can say to that but yes.

He closes his eyes, and he has never been more aware that he’s dreaming. He reaches out with his mind and finds the stones, and the trees whisper instructions to him that he doesn’t need. He’s never grown a marker they’ve left in the real world while actually in the middle of that marker before, but he can feel the touch of their hands on the stones, and those touches act as magnets, keeping his attention fixed on the stones as they are, while he dreams them into the wall that they should be. It ends up being about three feet high, and looks like the kinds of low stone walls you see in tourist brochures of the English countryside, homely while somehow also being just right for what they were meant for.

When he opens his eyes, he feels rested, good even, and Adam is smiling upside down at him. “Want to take a look?” he asks, and Ronan finds that he does. There are no breaks in the wall, so they have to step over it, but it looks in the real world just like it had looked in his dream, not even homely, not really, but more like _homey_ , as if this were the kind of wall he sees every day, and has just become a background part of the scenery for him. Something that looks like it belongs there and has somehow always been there.

“This will keep the evergreens from having to hold back the prickly bushes,” Adam says, sounding satisfied. “The next time we come here, to move it, the Dreaming Ring will have been safe within the wall for a while, so it will have more power to lend you while you move it.”

“I have to move it from inside the ring?” Ronan asks, not liking the idea of moving himself, along with the Dreaming Ring, to some unknown point within their eventual circle of fragments of Cabeswater. 

“I’ll be with you,” Adam says, which makes it, if anything, sound like and even worse idea. “I’ll have to be with you and probably sleeping as well, to help you hold us all together.”

“That sounds like a pretty ominous thing to say, Parrish,” Ronan snaps, but there isn’t much harshness in his voice. The task seems daunting, but after dreaming in the ring, he feels good, alert, aware of everything around him with an almost supernatural clarity. It might start to seem impossible again later, when the effects of being in the Dreaming Ring have worn off, but right at this moment, he believes it can be done.

“I don’t think it’s even going to be that hard,” Adam says. “Most of the energy it’s going to take will come from the Dreaming Ring, not from you. You’re more like the driver than anything else. And I’m there to read the map. Don’t worry about it for now. If we have to, we can come back and the Dreaming Ring can explain to you in your dreams what will have to happen to move it, and communicating with it in dreams makes it so that you can’t misunderstand anything it tries to tell you. Couldn’t you feel that?”

Ronan had, in fact, felt that, and he makes an effort to push his uncertainty away, to let Adam’s certainty drown out his own lack of faith.

Ronan stretches and then reaches in his back pocket for the slips of paper the psychic’s directions had been written down on. “Which one first?” he asks, showing the three slips to Adam, one in Calla’s neat hand, one in Maura’s rounded writing, the other in Adam’s hurrying handwriting. Adam pulls out of his own back pocket Ronan’s rough sketch of where their places already are, and where he speculates that the new places will be. 

“We’ll do Calla’s,” Adam says, after a long moment of looking between the two pieces of paper. “If your map is right, both of them should be more southerly, which is what we need to make a circle from what we’ve got, but Calla’s directions are better. I think I’m going to have to depend mostly on memory to get us to where I managed to scry to, and I’m not sure how good my memory is.”

They get back to the car and point the nose of the BMW in the direction of the ruined church, because while Calla had written the directions starting from that place in the field where they had always parked to enter Cabeswater, they mention the church as one of the points further on. Ronan gets as close to the ruins of the church as they can make it by car, and they get out and walk northwest until they find the lightning blasted elm, and then start looking for a tree with nests of owls in it. The area they are in is lightly forested, a welcome change from wading through the prickly bushes, and it’s Adam who eventually spots the tree with a pair of fledgling owls asleep on a branch about halfway up the tree. They wander this area for most of a half an hour before Ronan steps into a patch of sunlight that slants in that peculiar way that you only seem to get from having it stream through trunks of tall, old trees. He calls out to Adam, looking around for some kind of marker that has kept this place in place, a place that looks more like Cabeswater had looked than any other place they’ve found so far except for maybe the Clearing, because of the trees. 

They are immense and graceful, hung with moss and ivy, and the low sounds of insects buzzing and birds singing enliven the air. Adam appears next to him, and that is exactly the right word, he _appears_ there, first not there, then immediately present. Adam, as if he knows this, takes a couple of steps back, and then vanishes out of the patch of trees. A moment later, he’s back. 

“There’s a faerie ring near the tree with the owls in it,” Adam tells him, and then has to explain to Ronan that a faerie ring is a ring of mushrooms that people used to believe were planted and tended by fairies to trap foolish mortals that might wander into one of them. Or just for the fairies to dance around in the moonlight, depending on the benevolence of the book of folklore one was getting the information from.

For a while, they just wander the area, trying to find the boundaries of it, but it is, as Calla’s directions had noted, a big area, filled with the tall and magnificent trees of Cabeswater at its most beautiful. 

_”Non loqueris?”_ Ronan murmurs to the trees, and suddenly there is a babble of Latin coming at them, as if each individual tree is trying to say something different, which is not the way that it works, usually. Usually the trees speak together, all with one voice. Ronan hears ‘Greywaren’ and ‘Magus,’ but can’t parse the rest of it, it’s too jumbled. He catches the phrase: _Mind insidias,_ ‘Mind the trap’ and then Adam is calling to him.

“It’s the entrance to the cave,” Adam says, pointing. “The Cave of Ravens,” and Ronan understands, at least a little bit, why this part of Cabeswater is still here. They had worked magic in that cave, just a little bit, but all of them together, to save Gansey’s life. Ronan walks over to it and circles around it, keeping his distance, and the trees settle a little, and he hears more of them telling them to ‘mind the trap,’ which Adam’s wide eyes tell him he has translated correctly as well.

_”Quid est ruina?”_ Ronan tries, asking what the trap is, and the trees babble and gush for a few long moments, and then finally, as if remembering how to talk to people again after a long time of not doing so, they rustle out an answer.

_In speluncam in se trahit, mens eius in ruinam._

“‘The cave draws into itself,’” Adam says, frowning at the opening, but keeping well back, as is Ronan. “‘Mind the trap.’” 

Still keeping a goodly distance between the cave and himself, Adam nevertheless draws in a little closer to it and pulls his cards out. He kneels and lays out three.

The Hanged Man. Justice. The Fool.

“The hanged man is usually a choice to be made, a place where you are at a crossroads. Justice is all about karma, about what you do being what you get back. And the Fool is you.”

“I’m not liking the fact that I’m the Fool in this deck,” Ronan grumbles, but it’s not entirely true. There’s a certain amount of comfort in knowing there is a label for him within the cards, even if that label is somewhat less than flattering on the surface. And he remembers what Adam had said about the Fool. That it begins in nothing and reaches to infinity. That it’s the only tarot card with a zero, all the others have Roman Numerals, which makes it anachronistic.

Ronan finds his feet taking him closer to the cave mouth and stops abruptly when he realizes he’s moved up to stand next to where Adam is kneeling, without even having been aware that he had been moving closer. ‘The cave draws into itself.’ Ronan is unwillingly certain that it had been drawing him into itself.

_”Quid vultis in speluncam?”_ Ronan asks the trees, and they whisper amongst themselves for more than a minute, before finally answering with a single word.

‘What does the cave want?’

_Vita._

‘Life.’

“A crossroads, and karma,” Adam muses, his gaze going dreaming again in that way that it does sometimes in these places, so that it seems not distant, the way a dreaming gaze ought to appear, but rather like it’s entirely and deeply connected to the place. “We opened the cave. We asked for it, and Cabeswater opened it for us,” he says finally. “It’s our karma that has made it last, has kept this part of the forest alive. We still exist, and so, so does the cave.”

“And the crossroads?” Ronan asks, but he thinks he already knows, and he doesn’t like it.

“I think we have to go in,” Adam says solemnly, his face a little strained with fear. “We opened this place. I think we have to go in and deal with whatever is drawing life into it. The crossroads is that we can choose not to risk ourselves, can choose to leave this place as we found it, and I think if we do, the cave will hold it here. Hold this part of the forest in what passes for reality. I think that if we defeat the cave, the forest may fade with it, but I don’t know that for sure.”

“Okay, so before we do that,” Ronan says. “Before we decide to risk ourselves, maybe we can find other markers, like the faerie ring we came in through, that will keep this part of Cabeswater active. Can we do that?”

Adam thinks about it for a long time. Finally, he asks the trees: _”Numquid spelunca duplici quae hic facit?”_ ‘Is it the cave that keeps you here?’

The trees whisper and almost seem to whine, and then finally answer, _Spelunca vitam dare possunt._ ‘The cave can be made to give life back.’ But the trees had sounded reluctant to say it, as if they sense what Adam and Ronan would have to do to make that happen, and as if they fear for them.

_”Quomodo potest?”_ Adam asks, ‘How can it be changed?’ and the trees whisper for another long minute, and then things begin falling from the branches, drifting down like leaves, except they aren’t leaves, they are vines. They are dozens of lightweight lengths of vines, twisted together with many strands.

_Oportet ligare._ ‘You must bind it.’

Ronan tries to ask what it is, tries to phrase the question in several different ways, but the trees merely repeat that they must bind it.

Ronan collects the vines, dozens of them, lightweight and smelling of sap and green growing things. 

“A rope?” Adam asks, sounding doubtful to his own ears, but Ronan thinks he knows.

“No. A net. And we don’t have to go in, I don’t think. We just have to weave a net and attach it across the mouth of the cave. It isn’t something inside we have to bind. It’s the cave itself. The cave that Gansey almost died in. We used our wills, our minds, our magic, however you want to say it, to cheat it of Gansey’s life, but it still wants a life.”

“A net,” Adam muses, and gives Ronan an appreciative grin. “It’s a good thing you never let anyone know how smart you really are, Lynch,” he says. “People might have expectations of you if you did that.” 

Ronan grins, a baring of his teeth more than an expression of amusement, and says, “I found that out the hard way.”

They take the vines and walk as far back from the cave as they can get and still see its open mouth, and Ronan, who is good with his hands, begins to weave. Adam watches without trying to help. When Ronan glances at him, wondering why, Adam says, “Your card came up. This is your task.”

Ronan merely nods, and continues what he’s doing. “Look around. We’ll need something to attach it with,” Ronan says. “But don’t get close to the cave.”

“I have something to attach it with,” Adam says, and zips open his Cabeswater repair kit. He pulls out a battery operated staple gun with industrial grade staples loaded into it that Ronan recognizes as having come from the mudroom at the back of his own house, where he stores most of his tools that shouldn’t be left out in the weather.

“How did you know?” Ronan asks.

“I didn’t. Or, I don’t think I did. I put it in day before yesterday, and I had a reason, something to do with the Clearing, but I can’t remember what it was now.” Adam shrugs. “Karma,” he says, cocking his head as though in amusement. “Sometimes it works _for_ you.”

It takes Ronan well over an hour to weave the net, and his fingers are sticky with sap when he finishes with it. The trees had provided lots of vines, so Ronan had taken that as advice, and had woven it tight, with as little space between the criss-crossings of the weave as he could.

When they stand up, the trees whisper again, _Mind insidias._

Ronan carries the net and Adam carries the staple gun, and they close in on the mouth of the cave. Ronan can feel the pull of it growing stronger the closer he gets to it, and glancing over at Adam, sees that his face is pale and grim. “We’ll start on the right, go directly to the top, directly to the left, and directly to the bottom. Once it’s affixed in those four places, we’ll close up any gaps around the edges, but I think once we get the four primary points of the net connected to the cave, the pull of it will lessen.” Adam nods, but says nothing. 

They seem almost to float the last few feet to the cave mouth, their feet barely touching the earth as it tries to draw them in, and Ronan braces one hand on the top of the entrance digs the soles of his boots into the ground as firmly as he can, and holds the vine net up to the right side, hoping like hell that the rock will be soft enough or that the staples will be strong enough, and that they’ll both be fast enough.

Adam positions the stapler and pulls the trigger, and Ronan’s body rocks forward, pulling his feet across the ground and almost into the mouth of the cave. He braces his will and braces his feet, and moves to hold the net to the top of the cave, and Adam positions the staple gun and pulls the trigger. He feels something rushing toward them from within the depths of the cave, and grimly pulls the net taut across the opening, and Adam is already around the other side, putting in a staple as soon as the net is in place, and darkness seems to creep in at the edges of Ronan vision as he kneels on the ground and holds the net to the bottom edge of the stone, and Adam pulls the trigger. 

There are still gaps in the net where it’s hanging down around the top of the cave, but Ronan immediately feels that drawing in lessening, and his vision clears, and he hears Adam suck in a huge and unsteady breath, and they still hurry, because whatever is back there may still try to make a final attempt to break free, but they are careful, too, careful to space the staples evenly and keep them as close together as they can. When they run out of staples, Adam pulls another linked brick of them from his right front pocket -- Ronan is somehow not surprised by this -- and loads them with one quick, practiced movement, and they continue on, all the way around the mouth of the cave until the net covers it from top to bottom and from side to side. The net is almost the exact right size, leaving just enough slack around the edges to affix it to the rock with the staple gun, and when it’s done the pull of the cave is completely gone, and the trees are whispering their names joyously and with gratitude. 

They fall back onto their asses on the ground in front of the cave, abruptly tired, and Adam shows him, with a total lack of anything like surprise on his face, that the staple gun is empty, that they had had just enough of them to do the job.

“I can’t believe the staples were strong enough to penetrate the stone,” Ronan says, except that he _can_ believe it, that’s the thing. It should have been impossible in the real world, but the tools they use here are infused with their power, their… what had Adam called it? Their animus. Probably anything Adam had thought to have brought would have done the job, because they are creatures of power in these places, and their tools become extensions of that power, and it takes energy, yes, but this place fills them with energy, gives them a vastly greater amount of power to draw on, especially, Ronan understands, when they are working together. Then they are not just the Magician and the Greywaren, but some greater interlocking force.

Sometime later, when they recover a little of their stamina, they get up and walk the edges of this piece of Cabeswater, and they find several paths to the outside, each one marked with something, the faerie ring, a pair of glittering quartz chunks of rocks about the size of Ronan’s head, a scattering path of the white shells that Ronan recognizes as being the same things the Raven written large on the ground that they had flown over in the helicopter had been made of, and a tangle, finally, of the prickly bushes, but only a small patch of them, and one that Ronan digs up right away and tosses as far out into the surrounding forest, the regular forest, as he can.

The Glade is by far the biggest of the leftover places of Cabeswater that they’ve found so far, a mile or so across from southeast to northwest, about three quarters of that in the other directions. Even better, in the mental map of their places that Ronan has in his mind, it will connect up to the Copse within a mile or a little more, and while that will be a long path to make, they both agree that they want to do it today, even as tired as they are, because they don’t know if having the cave mouth bound will cause the Glade to start to fade, if it had been getting all of its energy from the force that had dwelt in the cave, and they don’t want to take the chance that it might fade.

Adam checks his bag of rocks, and reports that they probably don’t have enough to make it that far, and then, his eyes looking dreamy and _connected_ , he asks the trees, _”Vos potest crescere usque ad proximum et ad alias partes Cabeswater?”_ which Ronan is sure he’s going to have to ask again, in many different ways, for the trees to understand the question. ’Can you grow to reach the other remaining parts of Cabeswater?’

But the trees thrash wildly for long, long moments, and more vines start raining from the sky, these much longer and thicker, and Ronan supposes that is enough of an answer. They can, if the Greywaren and the Magician can make a path between the two. Adam starts gathering up the vines, slinging them over one arm like a waiter in a restaurant might carry a towel over one forearm, and eventually Ronan starts to help him, because there are a lot of vines -- but Ronan knows there will not be too many, there will be the perfect amount -- and they’re thicker than the ones they’d used to make the net, and heavier. Eventually, Adam has a tangle of vines draped over one arm and another tangle draped over that same shoulder, and Ronan has vines draped over both shoulders, carrying the shovel in one hand instead of resting on one shoulder, where the blade might damage the vines. They leave the Glade by the path of shells, headed northwest, and while the area they’re walking through is wooded, there always seems to be enough space between the trees to lay the vines end to end about three feet apart. Eventually they cross out of the wooded area and into the scrub, and Ronan uses the shovel to scrape the scrub far enough apart to make a path, and then the prickly bushes, but only about half a mile of them, which Ronon flings out alongside the path at Adam’s direction, before they reach the base of the stairs leading up to the Copse, laying the last of the vines so that their ends curl up and over the bottom step. On Ronan’s mental map, the car is nearly five miles away, while the Dreaming Ring is less than two miles away, and he is exhausted, and knows that ten minutes of sleep in the Dreaming Ring would go a long way toward restoring his energy. 

Adam looks so relieved when Ronan mentions this to him, Ronan is sure Adam had been thinking about the five mile trek back to the car with unhappy determination. They go up to the Copse just long enough for Ronan to check on the walls of the path, since he had dreamed of them especially, and they find that the walls are four feet high now, but otherwise look the same, like they had been carved by exceptionally beauty minded woodland sprites, and Ronan gets a little burst of energy just from seeing them as he had seen them in his mind, and Adam is clearly both surprised and impressed, which is enough to give Ronan even a little more in the way of energy.

Then they make their way back down the stairs and start across one of Henrietta’s many tan, bland fields, and it’s only when they get within a quarter of the mile or so from the Dreaming Ring that they have to deal with the prickly bushes. Since the Dreaming Ring is completely walled off, they can’t use the bushes to build anything with, but Ronan still digs them out of the ground when they are directly in their path and flings them off to the side. 

They climb over the rock wall and into the evergreens, pass the ring of flowers, and cross into the Dreaming Ring. Ronan again feels that prickle of gooseflesh crawl across his skin as he crosses into the ring, but he doesn’t hesitate to put the shovel down and fall onto the ground on his back in the middle of the ring. He is asleep before he is aware of falling asleep, and wakes again what can’t be more than thirty minutes later, from what the sun’s position in the sky tells him -- watches being unreliable things at best in Cabeswater. Adam is curled up on the ground beside him, still asleep, and Ronan had dreamed with the Dreaming Ring, had _communed_ with it, and understands, now, how the two of them can move it with the Ring providing power. He understands the need for there to be a circle within which the Ring can provide the hub, and that it doesn’t have to be a perfect circle, and also that the Dreaming Ring had been a Magician’s place, not a Greywaren’s, a place where Magicians had come to work out their problems, so is a little clearer now on how Adam had understood so clearly what could be done and how to do it in less than ten minutes, when it had taken Ronan half an hour to receive and decode that information. They speak slightly different languages, but there can be no misunderstandings while dreaming in the Ring. Only differences in the ways that they communicate.

Adam rolls over onto his back and opens his eyes, stretching his whole body in a long and languorous line that makes his shirt slide up and show his navel and the light brown trail of hair that begins directly below it, and Ronan looks away quickly so as not to be caught staring.

“This was such a good idea,” Adam says in a low voice humming with contentment.

Ronan understands exactly what he means. It’s not that he isn’t still tired. He had still expended the energy necessary to bind the cave. But a half an hour nap on the hard earth of the Dreaming Ring is a temporary restorative, something like drinking several cups of coffee and eating a carb heavy meal would have been, if they had been only the normal kind of tired, instead of the mystical kind of tired. It will get them back to the car without it being an ordeal, and it will get them home where they can get some food into them, and maybe get some real sleep so that their bodies really do start to recover.

Tonight, Ronan will try to dream some in-between points that will close up their circle, and they can call the Fox Way women and try scrying again, if Ronan fails to produce anything helpful.

“It’s a temporary measure,” Ronan says, kicking a little at Adam’s ankle to get him up and moving, though he’s pretty sure Adam already knows that. “We should get moving and get back home before it wears off.”

Adam makes a discontented sound, but hauls himself to his feet while Ronan does the same, and they make their way back to the car while still having enough energy for it not to feel like they’re having to drag themselves the whole way. Ronan stops at Burger King and gets them dinner, and Adam doesn’t even mention paying for his share, and they are tired again by the time they get home, even though it’s only late afternoon. They tear through the food, and then exchange looks of perfect understanding, and Ronan gets up and makes them each another sandwich. Who knows how much energy they had used today, and food and sleep are the only ways that Ronan knows how to replenish it.

They both take showers, hands and arms and shoulders sticky with sap from the vines they had carried, and when Ronan gets out of the shower Adam is already in his bed, sound asleep. Ronan considers joining him there, considers it long and deeply because he gets the feeling that Adam had meant it to be more than a one night thing, but then can’t quite let himself assume that because he’d been invited to sleep with Adam one night, he would have also been invited the next. He goes to sleep in his own bed and sleeps for thirteen hours.

\--

He wakes feeling a little achy, but reasonably refreshed. He gets up and brushes his teeth and takes a shower, cramming his legs into black jeans and topping it off with a black tank top. When he goes down the hall, he can hear the shower running in the guest bathroom, and is glad that Adam had managed around the same amount of sleep that he had. He makes coffee in the coffee maker that doesn’t require a cord and doesn’t have a tank to add water to, and then circles the kitchen to open the door to the fridge and look and see what they’ve got in there that he can eat. They are getting low on groceries -- Ronan isn’t used to shopping for more than just himself, so he hadn’t been heavily stocked on food anyway -- and they’re out of eggs and bacon and basically everything else you might need to prepare a decent breakfast, so he settles for some Honey Nut Cheerios and a bowl as big as he can find, though he makes sure to leave enough milk so that Adam can have cereal if he wants it. 

When he sits down at the table, he sees that there are three tarot cards laid out on one end of it.

The Fool. The Magician. The Lovers.

He freezes with his spoon halfway to his mouth, trying to think of what kind of reading Adam might have been doing to have gotten this as a result, and then feels himself flushing as his imagination fills in all kinds of ideas about what Adam might have been thinking.

More practically, why would Adam have left the reading out where Ronan would undoubtedly see it nearly as soon as he got up and moving about? And the three card reading is telling as well. Adam usually only does a three card lay out when he has a specific problem that he’s dealing with. When Adam has complicated questions, or when he has no ideas at all, there are a half a dozen different kinds of patterns he lays out to draw insight from. When it’s only three cards, it’s usually only one question. And Ronan even knows what the question is. It’s ‘what do I do next?’

Ronan drags his eyes away from the cards and begins to mechanically shovel cereal into his mouth. He eats as his mind races around in circles, will he ask Adam, will he ignore the reading, will he pretend he didn’t see it there?

That last is a little bit too much like lying to really feel right to Ronan. Not when Adam had clearly left the reading out for Ronan to see. And Adam surely had done just that.

He finishes his cereal and rinses out the bowl automatically, and then circles around to the end of the table to look at the cards, which is where he is standing when Adam comes downstairs in jeans and a faded Coca-Cola t-shirt. Adam comes to stand next to him, and Ronan can’t quite make himself look at Adam to see what expression is on his face.

“I wanted to know what we should do today,” Adam says, his voice low and not quite steady. “I meant with the whole Cabeswater thing, but this is what came up.”

“Why did you leave it out for me to see?” Ronan asks, and notes that his voice isn’t having its steadiest day either.

When Adam answers, his Henrietta accent curls around every word. “It seemed wrong to hide answers to questions that concern us both, Ronan.”

There is a long pause in which Ronan isn’t sure what to say.

“It doesn’t mean we have to do anything about it,” Adam says finally. “It’s only a possibility, not a prediction.”

“Is it a possibility you want?” Ronan asks, and turns to look at Adam, who is looking down at the cards, the tip of one long, slender finger touching the corner of The Lovers card.

“It’s a possibility I have wanted for a while now. I have been putting it off because we’re good now, and I know sometimes this kind of change can make things not be good anymore. But the more I know about what I can do, the more I trust the tools that help me do it. So when I get this as a reading for a relatively simple question, I can no longer dismiss it out of hand just because I got something I wasn’t expecting.” Adam turns to look at Ronan. “Just because I’m not sure what I’m doing, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t even consider trying.”

Ronan leans in and kisses him carefully, keeping his mouth light and undemanding. He can feel Adam’s body trembling through the kiss, but Adam kisses him back, and after a moment, turns so that he’s facing Ronan squarely while they kiss in the morning sunlight streaming in through the kitchen windows.

Ronan pulls back a little so that he can meet Adam’s eyes. “I believe in your tools, too,” he says. “And I’ve wanted this for a long time. I don’t think it’s going to change things in a bad way. But I don’t want you doing things you aren’t ready for because the cards think it would be a good idea. The cards will probably think it’s a good idea another time, and I know that the cards are meant for advice, but it doesn’t have to be advice we take now.”

“I want to,” Adam says simply, and leans in to kiss Ronan, this time curling a hand around the back of his neck and pressing the kiss firmly between them. Adam’s mouth slides open and his tongue slips along Ronan’s lower lip, which makes Ronan gasp a little, so that his own mouth drops open, and they are suddenly kissing in earnest. Ronan wraps his hands around Adam’s upper arms and pulls him in closer, and Adam lets himself be pulled, until the fronts of their bodies are pressed tight against each other, and Ronan can feel the hard length of Adam’s cock pushed up against his hip. He can feel his own cock pressed against Adam’s belly, and for a long moment they just press themselves together, their lips the only things soft about them as they lick at one another’s tongues and Ronan drags his teeth along Adam’s bottom lip, and Adam makes a little moaning sound that makes Ronan wish he knew more so that he could _be_ more for Adam right now. 

“Come to bed with me,” Ronan murmurs against Adam’s mouth, and Adam’s breath hitches slightly and his hips jerk forward a little against the front of Ronan’s body.

“Yeah, alright,” Adam murmurs back, and they slowly draw back from each other. Adam takes Ronan’s hand and leads him back up the stairs and into Adam’s bedroom, which is all fine with Ronan, and when they are inside with the door safely closed behind them, despite the empty house, Adam catches the bottom of his t-shirt and pulls it up over his head, showing Ronan the lean cuts of muscle pulled tight under naked skin, and Ronan sees the pale brown trail of hair leading downward from beneath Adam’s navel, and is suddenly flushed with heat and with craving. He jerks his own tank top over his head and lets it drop on the floor, and he can feel Adam looking at him: taller, but not quite as broad in the shoulders as Adam is, but more muscle on his frame anyway, because Ronan has never had to miss meals to pay his bills. 

Adam raises his hands, his eyes a little dazed, and presses his palms to Ronan’s chest and draws them down his belly. His fingertips catch on the waist of Ronan’s jeans, and Ronan shivers at the tug of fabric against his aching cock. He takes Adam’s shoulders and turns him, pushing him back until his knees hit the bed and Adam sits down abruptly. “Scoot back,” Ronan tells him, and Adam does, wordlessly, and Ronan slides up onto the bed to straddle Adam’s thighs and leans down and licks the long and elegant line of one of Adam’s collarbones, tasting clean skin with a slight tang of something electric beneath it, something that is just the taste of Adam’s skin. Adam’s arms come up on either side of Ronan’s waist, his hands catching at his hipbones, and he pulls Ronan down so that Ronan is mostly lying on top of Adam, their mouths aligned again, and just when Ronan is going to lean in to kiss Adam again, Adam tucks his face into the side of Ronan’s neck and bites gently at the tendon where his neck joins his shoulder. Ronan’s head rocks back to allow Adam access, and Adam runs his tongue along that same slice of skin and then scrapes at it with his teeth, a feeling that travels straight to Ronan’s cock and causes him to arch his back, grinding himself down against Adam, who makes a low, encouraging noise in response. They do fumble a little, Ronan tries to raise up so that he’s not crushing Adam while Adam does his best to try to drag him closer, but even their fumbles seem to work out okay, as the motion snugs their cocks up against each other, and they both moan aloud. Ronan rocks his hips helplessly downward against Adam’s hard length, and Adam’s head falls back on his neck as he sucks in a harsh and shaky breath. Adam’s hands are sliding along Ronan’s back, and then when he rocks his hips again, Adam’s hands go down to Ronan’s hips, clutching at them with hard fingertips and rocking up even as Ronan is rocking downward.

“Ronan,” Adam breathes. “Ronan, take your jeans off, I think this will work better without…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, but Ronan is fairly practical, and can see exactly how it would work better without the jeans. He slides off the bed and jerks open his fly, shoving his jeans and underwear and all down his legs and into a puddle on the floor, and when he looks back at Adam, Adam is dragging his own jeans and underwear down, arching his back a little to get them past his hips, and Ronan barely steps out of the way in time as they are flung off the side of the bed.

Adam is long and lithe and gorgeous, his whole body corded with lean muscle, his cock long and red and angry looking. Ronan climbs back up onto the bed and Adam grabs his arms and pulls him down half on his side, and then rolls so that he’s on his side as well, and they are pressed together again, all along the fronts of their bodies, and Ronan can feel the hot, smooth skin of Adam’s cock sliding against the curve of his hip until he turns them both a little and gets them lined up so that they’re pressed together again, and then because it’s the only thing Ronan knows how to do, he wraps his hand around both of their cocks and strokes them, slow but hard, and Adam’s back arches and his hips jerk into Ronan’s hand, and he breathes out Ronan’s name like it’s a small miracle tumbling from his lips.

It’s clumsy and a little uncoordinated, jerking them off together, but they are both breathing like they might be dying, moans and soft sounds and sounds like breaking things, all coming from one or the other of them at different points, and Ronan wants to lean in to kiss Adam again, but isn’t sure he can concentrate on kissing Adam and jerking them off at the same time, and then Adam’s hand slips down between their bodies, long-fingered and strong, and wraps around the two of them with Ronan’s hand, and it is better, there is a rhythm, a slow upward pulse of desperation, and Ronan forgets to be gentle as he slants his lips down hard against Adam’s, but it’s okay, Adam bites at Ronan’s tongue and then hard at Ronan’s lower lip, and all of it slips from Ronan’s lips to the back of his neck, down the line of his spine in a shaft of fire, and pools in the cradle between his hipbones.

He can feel when Adam is going to come, it shudders through his whole body, but bunches especially in the big muscles of his thighs, where it trembles for long, ecstatic moments before Adam’s back arches and he cries out, his hand tightening around their cocks as he spurts across the their fingers and against Ronan’s belly. Ronan let’s go of Adam’s cock, feeling him shivering against Ronan and still moaning breathlessly, and works his own cock with vicious determination, and then Adam’s hand closes around his hand, working with him, feeling ten times as good as his own hand alone does, and he thinks of the way that he’s jerking off slicked up with Adam’s come, and that is enough to think, that thought takes away all of his other thoughts, and he grates out, “Adam, Adam,” and feels himself shuddering just as Adam had when he, himself, comes, his eyes clenched tightly shut with starbursts of red and white light behind his closed lids, and then he is painting Adam’s belly with his come, he can feel the head of his cock pressing up against it. Then he is trembling and limp, still breathing like each breath might be his last, and Adam’s hand has loosened around Ronan’s cock, but he hasn’t let go. 

When Ronan opens his eyes, Adam is staring at him with shock and desire, and heat almost immediately kindles again deep in Ronan’s belly at seeing that look on Adam’s face. Ronan doesn’t know what is showing on his own face, probably something not that different, he isn’t sure about the shock, but he can feel the taut expression of wanting on his face. He leans in and kisses Adam, slow and easy this time, all wet heat and careful, gentle pressure of lips and tongues. They lay there like that for a long time, their bodies still pressed together, even after they stop kissing and are just looking at each other.

After a few minutes, one side of Adam’s mouth quirks up, and he says, “That wasn’t so hard,” and Ronan laughs, deep and rolling and happy. Adam looks down between their bodies at their hands and cocks and bellies, and says, “Probably going to get sticky soon,” and Ronan agrees that this is probably so but doesn’t move immediately away.

He says, “Adam. Thank you.” He’s not sure what he means, only that it’s what he feels, and Adam blushes a little, but his mouth is a soft curve.

“You’re welcome,” he says. “And you, too.”

“We should get wiped down with something, or we’re both going to have to get back into the shower,” Ronan eventually says, when he finally feels like leaving this moment behind doesn’t mean leaving it behind forever. That there will be other moments like this, and he’ll still get to feel this way. He gets up and crosses the hall to the guest bathroom and runs a washcloth under warm water, and is turning to bring it back to the bedroom when he realizes that Adam has followed him, and so Ronan cleans them both up just standing in the bathroom, careful to get every trace of come he can find, and then moving to one side so Adam can wash his hands. He deposits the soiled washcloth into the wicker laundry hamper, and then pauses as he turns to go out the door because Adam has his back to him, and Ronan hadn’t had the chance to get a good look at the long, strong line of his back and the elegantly muscled curves of his ass.

“Are you looking at my ass, Lynch?” Adam asks, and Ronan glances up guiltily and catches Adam’s reflection in the mirror. Adam is smiling and blushing at the same time, and Ronan sees his own face go pink even as he returns the smile in the mirror. 

“Yeah, well,” he says, turning away. “I’m mostly just confirming that it’s a hot ass. I’ve suspected for a couple of years, but you never really know until you see it without pants.”

“You’re a terrible person, Ronan Lynch,” Adam says, and follows Ronan back into the bedroom, looking, Ronan suspects, at _his_ ass, but not looking back to check and see. They both manage to get dressed again, and Ronan feels like he should be at least a little bit tired, there had been some definite exertion involved, but mostly he feels energized and ready to take on the rest of the day, whatever that involves.

\-- 

Adam is wolfing down a bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats while Ronan tells him about the three in-between places he’d dreamed, and the one place that isn’t in-between, but which is almost directly south of the Hollow, so that it’s sitting right on the ley line.

“How is it that you can know the places and the paths between them, but not know what’s in the places themselves?” Adam asks.

Ronan shrugs one shoulder. “I think it works like scrying, more or less. I think I can feel the places in my head when I dream them, but all I can _see_ in the dreams are the areas around them, the way to get to and from them. And speaking of scrying, we still have the spot you scried to check out, and one from Maura, and do you want to check with the Fox Way women to see if they can come up with anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Adam says, after a long moment of thought. “We have a total of six places to try to get through as it is, and we never make it through more than two in a day. There’s no reason to bother them unless we get stuck in some way, or you stop being able to dream new nodes.”

It’s not even noon yet, so there is no question that they are going to try to get to at least a couple of these places today. Plus Adam wants to make the circuit, by which he means he wants to check over every place they’ve found and seeded into a garden, just to check and make sure all of those places are still doing okay.

“You know that means we’ll probably only get to one of these today,” Ronan says, not really arguing, but not really content either.

“It’s better to take time to make sure our gardens are growing strong on their own than it would be to have to go back and fix something that went wrong,” Adam says. “I really think they are all probably fine, but if we have to fix something, it’s better to do it before it gets bad than it is to wait for it to get bad, and then have it possibly take a lot more energy to fix the problem. Besides, the circuit is really only about an eight mile walk. We can start at the closest in-between node to the Glade, see if we can get it connected to the Glade, check on the Glade especially because of the cave, and then just walk the paths through the other places we’ve made. Then if we have time, we can walk down the ley line and check on the node that you dreamt there. I’m curious about how something might be doing sitting right on the ley line, like the Hollow was.” 

Ronan grumbles a little about how much walking it’s going to take to get back to the car that way, but they’re half-hearted grumbles, and Adam merely smiles indulgently at him.

“Do we need to get more rocks for paths?” Ronan asks as they’re headed toward the car, and Adam grins at him.

“Probably a good idea. Unless we find things along the way to build with, the rocks seem like the most reliable method of marking off new paths.”

“I’m not going in,” Ronan says, glowering. Adam knows how he feels about Wal-Mart.

“If you can think of another place in town to get them, I’m not married to the Wal-Mart, Ronan,” Adam says, his expression serious, but his tone ringing with laughter.

Ronan puts some real effort into thinking about some other place where they might be able to pick up a bag of gardening pebbles, and can’t come up with anything. “Fucking Wal-Mart,” he says, and peels out of the driveway of the Barns with enough screeching of tires to vent some of his displeasure.

Ronan refuses to even park the BMW at the Wal-Mart. He pulls up to the curb at the gardening center and just idles illegally there while Adam goes inside and buys his bag of rocks and comes back out and shoves them into the Cabeswater repair kit. Adam throws him a disapproving look, but doesn’t actually try to convince Ronan to do it any differently. 

Ronan drives them west across the field, and a little way north past the barrier that used to delineate Cabeswater, and then stops the car. He gets out and gets the shovel out of the trunk, while Adam shoulders the Cabeswater repair kit, and Ronan says, “We’re looking for a piece of an old building, I couldn’t tell if it was a barn or a shack in the woods or what. It’s got a few beams still standing, though, so I think we should be able to recognize it pretty clearly. It’s about a quarter of a mile that way.” He points with the shovel. 

They cover that distance in almost no time at all, since they’re walking through a plain old Henrietta field, rather than through scrub or prickly bushes. The fields may be bland and tan, but they’re about twenty times more pleasant to walk through than the prickly bushes.

The beams of what looks like it used to be some kind of small shack are right where they’re supposed to be in Ronan’s mental map, and he circles around behind them, trips on a half-buried beam, and almost falls directly into a deep, narrow valley, which is surrounded by prickly bushes, so would have been a most unpleasant fall. Ronon immediately starts uprooting prickly bushes and leaving them in a pile, first making a path through which Adam can walk to get into the valley. One side of the valley is heavily clothed in alders, and a small, clear stream runs through it at its lowest point, and seems to start somewhere deeper in, but ends in nothingness at the edge of the patch of prickly bushes, literally in nothingness, it just stops _being_. The banks of the stream are covered in patches of some kind of blue flower that look familiar to Ronan, but which he can’t name. The other side of the valley is a sharply slanting slope that is pock marked with the small, dark eyes of cave mouths. Ronon keeps his eyes mistrustfully on those dark indentations in the earth even as he is clearing out prickly bushes and Adam is wandering over toward the alders, asking, _Non loqueris?_

The alders whisper and sough in response, but don’t actually speak to Adam. Nevertheless, he pulls out his cards at the edge of the wooded area and shuffles the deck, laying out three. Ronan pauses in his de-bushing to see what cards have come up.

The Emperor. The Chariot. The Sun.

“The Emperor is a logic over heart card, usually coming up when you really want to do something, but it turns out to be logically bad for you in the long run. The Chariot is directed energy, which means there’s a pretty good chance that someplace in this valley is some kind of purpose, something it was meant for. The Sun is growth and prosperity, sometimes healing.”

He sits back on his heels and looks at the cards. “The Sun coming up this early in a reading probably means that this place is doing pretty well on its own and doesn’t need much help from us.” He stands up and wanders into the alders a little deeper, asking _”Non loqueris?”_ again.

This time the trees answer, though they speak to Ronan, not Adam. 

_Haec non possunt, Greywaren. Speluncae custodiantur._ ‘This place cannot be used, Greywaren. The caves are guarded.’

Ronan steps forward. _”Bilia quid?”_ ‘Guarded by what?’

_Spiritus sunt calles per quos mortuos._

Adam and Ronan exchange a look. “Directed energy, the valley’s purpose is to house these spirit paths,” Adam says. “And… The Emperor could mean our desire to use this place and connect it to our gardens, weighed against the logic of the matter, which is to say that we might _want_ this place to be one of our in-between places, but is it logical to make it one if these are the spirit paths guarded by the dead. I don’t know what that means, and just hearing it makes something in my chest feel heavy.”

Ronan looks at the eyes of the caves peering out of the steep slope opposite the alders in the valley.

_Greywaren tuta est, sed magi timetur,_ the trees whisper.

Adam turns to look at him. “‘The Greywaren is safe here, but the Magician is in peril,’” Adam translates perfectly. He looks back at the trees, his jaw set in a stubborn line.

Ronan lays a hand on his shoulder. “I think we should listen to them, Adam,” he says. “We haven’t had great luck with caves in Cabeswater as a whole, before or after it disappeared. And there are two other in-betweens we can use between the Hollow and the Glade.”

“I want to know why I’m in peril, but you’re safe,” Adam says, still with that stubborn set to his jaw.

“I think it’s because the dead are just the dreaming memories of once living people, and dreams can’t really hurt me,” Ronan says. “Not since I got control over my power. It’s like the dreaming tree in the Clearing. I can always tell the difference between what is real and what is a dream in there, but you can’t. If the trees tell me this place can’t be used, I’m inclined to believe them, honestly. The fact that they know that we want to use it for something means that they have to have been feeling what we’ve been doing with the other fragments of Cabeswater that got left behind. They’re telling us this place can’t be a part of our gardens, and I believe them.” 

Adam’s eyes are fierce and unafraid, and Ronan thinks that if the threat were just to him, just to the Magician, he might choose to argue the point with the trees. But if they say it can’t be used for what they are trying to build, then there doesn’t seem to be much point in arguing in favor of it.

“The trees don’t lie,” Ronan says, and Adam sighs, and bends down to pick up his cards and tuck them back into their case.

“It would have been a perfect distance,” he says bitterly.

“There are other nodes. Ones that won’t put you in danger,” Ronan says. “Besides, I agree with you. The spirit paths guarded by the dead sounds like something I know, somewhere in my hindbrain, where all your caveman instincts live. Something I know to be afraid of.”

Adam nods glumly. “Yeah. That’s exactly what it feels like. Alright. Under protest, but I agree. This place should be left alone.”

“We should have known anyway that not all the nodes would be usable,” Ronan says, actually feeling a little stupid about it in retrospect. “We knew Cabeswater had darker places in it. This place will probably still be in it if we manage to bring it back. But we should have realized that some of the nodes would be leftover dangers. The Glade would have been one, if we hadn’t been able to bind the cave.”

Adam hefts the Cabeswater repair kit onto his shoulder. “Alright, where to next?” he asks, still subdued, but trying to put a good face on it.

“Do you still want to walk the gardens? We aren’t that far from the Glade, and we could walk the path and come to the next in-between node from the other direction,” Ronan suggests.

Adam’s face lightens a little, as Ronan had hoped it would. He knows walking their little bits of interconnected leftover Cabeswater is enough to make him feel better about this particular disappointment, and suspects that Adam feels the same.

“Yeah, alright. We’ll do it that way,” Adam agrees.

The drive to the Glade is a short one of necessity, because the car can drive through the forested area around it even less well than it can drive through scrub, but at least the walk through the plain Henrietta woodland is pleasant enough, and in the Glade, the trees are ecstatic to see them.

They report that the cave is still bound, and while it’s bound it puts out life instead of drawing it in. This is something neither of them had made the connection to before, though in retrospect Ronan remembers the trees telling them that it could be made to give life. Curiously, they walk the area of the Glade, and while it doesn’t seem bigger in the way that the Hollow had gotten bigger after their first time working on it, the Glade does seem to be expanding. The path out of the Glade to the Copse is easy to pick out because it’s a trellis of vines, woven together intricately and artfully, almost as pretty to look at as the path between the Copse and the Clearing.

Adam deals a single card.

The Sun.

Satisfied, he puts away his deck. They walk along the pleasant path that leads to the Copse, and Ronan notes while they’re still a half a mile away that the prickly bushes that had been growing to either side of the path have been taken over by the ivy that had taken over the hillsides that lead up to the Copse. Closer to the stairway that leads up to the Copse, they begin to see daylilies interspersed with the ivy. Once up the stairs, they are immediately surrounded by trees. The trees have totally taken over this end of the area, and Ronan is vaguely worried about the blackberry bushes. But it turns out that the trees have kept to their own part of the garden here. The bench Adam had made of gardening pebbles looks like it was carved out of a single piece of blue veined marble. The blackberry bushes are still heavy with fruit, still tasting like the perfect time of the summer for them, and Ronan starts to believe Adam that the Copse might always be a pocket of summer. The ferns and daylilies behind the blackberry bushes have pushed back yet more of the prickly bushes, and there are none in the Copse itself at all. 

Adam draws a single card.

The Sun.

He puts his deck away. They walk along the path with its new taller wall, Ronan occasionally stopping to peek through a swirl or a spiral.

The Clearing has at least doubled in size, the stream wide enough now that you can’t just step over it, you have to either go through it, or walk around the point where it burbles out of the rock. Even though they’d only planted oaks, and even then, only a relative few, the Clearing is surrounded by elms, oaks, and maples, and the trees are growing tall enough now to create that slant of golden light that Ronan remembers so clearly. The poppies still bloom under the canopy of the trees, even though it makes no sense, since they can’t get any sun. 

Adam draws a single card.

The Sun.

The ledge they walk out onto to get to the Grove from the Clearing isn’t any wider, but Ronan had purposely directed his attention to making the wall tall enough that it can easily be used as a banister. It’s made of what look like interlocking flat stones, although these had also been made from the gardening pebbles. From the ledge path, you can’t see much of the ground below, and Ronan isn’t sure if that is because that ground is in flux, or because it’s just a field and there’s nothing to see. When it slants downward to lead into the Grove, they begin to smell water, and while enclosed as the Grove is in the grotto it lies in, it can’t really spread, the pond has become a bit larger, and the trees themselves look taller and healthier, their branches a paler and more luminous shade of green. The willows greet them by name, and tell them that the shadows have not come back, and that they are sharing the wellspring under the pond with the places connected with this one. 

Ronan and Adam thank them, and Adam draws a card.

The Sun.

Climbing out of the Grove, the path is again lined with rock walls, but these look more like the ones Ronan had dreamed around the Dreaming Circle, both homely and homey looking, about three feet tall, and the path itself is only about a thousand feet long now before they come out into the Hollow. 

The Banyan tree booms out a greeting to the Greywaren and the Magician, and the beeches and poplars whisper their own greetings. The beeches are still pushing the prickly bushes back, and Ronan wonders if they’ll eventually reach all the way back to the shale wall that Adam had chiseled the design into to help open the ley line. The pond isn’t much bigger, but the waterfall has at least doubled in size, and the young spruces that had just begun to line the banks of it have become mature trees. The footpath that had, on Ronan’s first visit, looked like it could be a game trail, now looks like he could drive the BMW up it if he wanted to.

Adam draws a card.

The Sun.

Ronan can feel the happiness and satisfaction coming off of Adam in waves, and is glad he’d suggested this route to their next in-between point, because nothing pleases Adam more than a difficult job done well, and all of their gardens are doing much better than merely well.

They pause at the foot of the path that leads into the Hollow, deciding whether or not to continue on south, down the length of the ley line, which will lead them to an outlier point, something not really useful for connecting their gardens, but which is on the ley line, so is of interest because of that, or whether to head toward the southwest, where the next of Ronan’s in-between nodes lies, according to his mental map.

“I’d rather get at least one node connected today than check out something that might be potentially interesting, but isn’t likely to be useful,” Adam says finally. “How far is this next point?”

“A little less than a mile,” Ronan says. “Mostly through the fields, I think though there are more likely to be prickly bushes the closer we get to the node. The prickly bushes are like chewed off edges of the bits of Cabeswater that we’re finding. Anything that gets worn away from the node turns into the fucking things.” 

“They have their uses,” Adam says. “They can be used to build with, sometimes.” Adam opens up the Cabeswater repair kit and pulls out his bag of stones. “Here, take some of these,” he says. “You work on the right side and I’ll work on the left.”

Ronon shoves stones into his pockets until they bulge with them, and they begin walking southwest through the field they’re in. They haven’t even gone half a mile when the prickly bushes start to show up, and Ronon swings the shovel off of his shoulder to clear them a path while Adam takes up the duty of placing stones on both sides of the path. In Ronan’s dreaming mind, there had been a trio of red boulders, all together in a cluster, one of them quite a bit larger than the other two, that had marked the entrance to this node. When they actually arrive at the node, only two of the boulders stand there, the big one and one smaller one, and Ronan, pissed off at this sign of the prickly bushes destruction, digs a clearing twenty feet around the boulders on all sides before they slip around the north side of them, and climb upward a little way onto a hummock, a small rise in the earth that is carpeted with soft, ankle high green grass. It’s not a very big hummock, but at the crest of it is a stand of trees that Ronan can’t put a name to, slender and tall, with pale bark, almost like a beech, but Ronan knows what a beech tree looks like, and besides, these are too tall for beeches, too slender to be as tall as they are. 

They walk up the slight incline, and the trees whisper urgently, _Greywaren, Magus, accipe stercoris columbarum quo operient vertice recte tueri moenia vestra sepulchrum._

“Something about using the seedpods to protect the well,” Adam says, giving Ronan a questioning look. 

“And it’s telling us to build a wall around it,” Ronan says. “‘Take the seed pods and cover the hilltop, build one of your walls to protect the well,’” Ronan translates. Tiny, spiny things start to rain out of the upper branches of the trees, landing all around them, some even catching in Adam’s hair. 

Ronan reaches and plucks one out, and feels a tingle of something when he touches it, it feels magical in the way that the Dreaming Ring had felt magical, a much more potent form of magic than they usually find in any of their places, if they can feel it with their bare hands. Adam, without even bothering to first pull out his deck, digs for the spade in the Cabeswater repair kit, and they gather up as many of the little spiny seedpods as they can -- the vast majority of them seem to have landed almost at their feet, and Adam begins to plant, while Ronan takes the shovel and clears out prickly bushes in a fifty foot circle around the hummock, dropping rocks out of his pockets, and having to go back several times for more rocks, as he clears the area to build the wall the trees had asked for, while Adam digs small holes in a widening spiral around the stand of trees already atop the hummock, dropping a seed into each one. When he runs out, and the trees start to whisper, something Ronan can’t quite make out, but having to do with space, the tops thrash again and rain the little seedpods down around Adam, who gathers them up and continues to plant them in a widening spiral until he gets all the way out to where Ronan is clearing out the last of the prickly bushes and dropping the last of the stones for a wall. He looks around, first, for a path that will lead them out and take them to their next node, and finds a small patch of normal Henrietta forestland on the western side of the hill. He leaves that pathway out free of stones, but totally encloses the rest of the hummock and good chunk of ground surrounding it.

When they finish, Ronan is turning to Adam to ask if he has any idea of what the well might be, when the trees whisper, almost demand, _Dormite iam, nova nascantur tutoribus ædifices murum, bene custodiri debent._ ‘Sleep now, grow new guardians, build the wall; the well must be protected.’

_”Quid est bonum?”_ Adam asks, ‘What is the well?’ and the trees whisper and murmur, and finally answer.

_Cor ueris principium quod aliquando imperium, elicere ad eum modum, si fieri potest, confortatus est._ ‘A heart spring, a source of power for what we once were, a way to lure it back, if it can be made strong again.’

Adam and Ronan exchange startled looks. The trees whisper: _Sentimus locis potestatis eos bene nutrire faciant bene._ ‘We feel your places of power, the well can feed them.’

“They’re like the Grove,” Adam says. “They remember what it is to be part of Cabeswater. Maybe the well is like what is under the pond in the Grove, a wellspring of power.”

“Before I sleep here, do a reading,” Ronan says, because trees have never lied to him, and these trees he is sure are telling the truth, but he wants to make sure they are doing everything they need to be doing to build this place up and make it strong again.

Adam takes out his cards and shuffles them and lays out three.

The Chariot. Temperance. The Fool.

“The Chariot means a source of directed power,” Adam says. “Temperance is all about balance, about how things being in balance leads to contentment, and you. Obviously because they want you to sleep for them here, now, because they feel the urgent need to be protected right away.”

Adam looks up at him. “We should take a look at the well, first. I’m not sure why, except that maybe there is something you could dream about it if you saw it and felt its power.”

They climb to the top of the hummock and slip into the Stand of trees there, and in the precise center of it is a well. A stone well, but one that doesn’t look like it was ever built by human hands, even though it is made from stones fitted together the way a human might build one. But it feels like a natural thing, like a thing that had grown this way, no matter what it looks like, and Ronan can smell the sweet smell of water coming from deep within it, along with a scent that is almost like ozone, a scent he associates with power. He finds a clear spot between two trees, and Adam sits down in it, crossing his legs to make a place for Ronan to lay his head. Ronan drops to the ground and lets his head rest in Adam’s lap and closes his eyes, and for a few long moments, he isn’t sure he’s going to be able to do it.

The trees whisper: _Somnum et somnia nascuntur arbores ædifices murum, reple atque inde cum dormis inebriemur uberibus._ ‘Sleep and dream, grow the guardian trees, build the wall, fill the well, and drink deep from it when you wake.’

Ronan listens to the wind soughing through the tall, ethereal branches of the trees around him, closes his eyes, and dreams.

In this dream, the prickly bushes outside the line of stones Ronan had laid down reach like hands to cross the border he has made, and he concentrates on that first, sensing that he can’t let them break the ring of stones, and he grows the wall tall, almost eight feet, until he can no longer feel the reaching of the bushes. Then he turns his attention to the seedpods and he waters them with his mind, he knows somehow to draw the water he uses from the well, and the seedpods burst through the earth, tender green sprouts only for an instant before they are thrusting upward through the soil, laid out in the spiral pattern that Adam had planted them in, and he senses that the pattern is important, though he doesn’t know why and he doesn’t know how Adam had known to plant them that way. When the new trees are almost as tall as the original Stand, he directs his attention toward the well, and feels the goodness of the water, the rightness of it, the _grace_ , and he tries to draw more of it up from under the ground, but realizes almost right away that the trees have been holding as much of it in place as they can, and they will make more, over time, but for now, he has to _dream_ the well full again, and he puts his dream hands into the water, reaching deep beneath the ground, and then he connects his dreaming energy to it, he forms a conduit between them, and feels the well drawing power from him directly, feels it doing so slowly and carefully, feels that it is aware of his mortality, and that it won’t take more than he can safely give. Then he looks at the place with his dream eyes and sees the pathway he had left out of it, and knows that they will have to do at least one more node today, because if he leaves that pathway open, the prickly bushes will use it to push their way in, and the balance of power in this place is delicate, that it used to be vast, but that it had been eaten away quickly by reality, by mundanity, by the loss of Cabeswater’s magic, and that it has sensed them building and had been waiting for them and holding on as desperately as had the Grove, waiting for them, fighting back and hoping that they would reach it in time. He stretches out his dreaming gaze a little further, and senses a need, and creates a bucket and a rope to drop down into the well, and he can tell when he’s done all that he needs to do, he can feel the completion of this place, and he lets himself wake. 

Adam has his hands on Ronan’s face, and is frowning down at him, brow furrowed with worry. Relief washes over his expression when he sees Ronan wake up, and he says, “You were getting cold to the touch. The trees promised they wouldn’t let you give more than you could.” 

Ronan nods without lifting his head, he is tired and wired at the same time, and he feels almost like he does when he brings some object deliberately out of a dream, like his body doesn’t belong to him yet, though he senses that it isn’t quite the same as that, it’s just the amount of effort he had expended. Eventually he shoves himself upright, and Adam smooths a hand along his back, and Ronan realizes that his skin is wet with sweat, his shirt damp with it. “It will be better once I drink from the well,” he says, and knows that it’s true, just like it had been better when they had gone into the pond in the Grove, and it won’t be as temporary a fix as sleeping in the Dreaming Ring had been, this will be a more or less permanent restorative.

Adam climbs to his feet and helps him up, and Ronan sways a little on his feet, but looks around curiously, seeing that the Stand looks pretty much exactly as it had with his dreaming eyes, that the new trees are tall and strong, the wall is high and will keep the prickly bushes from biting off any more pieces of this place. Finally he walks unsteadily over to the well, and sees that his bucket and rope are there, and the well is full enough that he can look down into it and see the glint of sunlight on the water. He throws the bucket down into the water and then hauls it back up, and the water smells sweet and his thirst is deep, so he drinks, and the water tastes like the nectar of some exotic flower, and he can feel it pouring power back into him, and it happens quickly, the water in the well is _strong_ , he only has to drink a little before he feels like he has regained all of what he had used to dream the protections for this place, and to fill the well again.

_Omne quod bene, bene est, et virtus Altissimi hortorum auxilium crescere,_ the trees say, their voice stronger with the addition of the new trees they had grown.

“‘All will be good, the well is full, and its power will help your gardens grow,’” Adam says, getting the translation nearly perfect for once, and Ronan nods, the power of the water of the well still pulsing through him, making him feel almost light headed.

_Potum da magi, ut eius gratia._

Adam’s eyes go wide, and Ronan hands him the bucket, which is still nearly half full. “As a thank you for your work,” Ronan says. “They want you to drink, too. It’s strong.”

Adam takes the bucket from Ronan’s hands and tips it up, and for a moment Ronan can sense Adam as though he were wearing all his Magician’s power like a mantle, as though all that he is and all that he can do shines out from beneath his skin, and then Adam gasps in a breath and pulls the bucket away from his lips, his eyes wide and glittering like gemstones in his face. Ronan can almost see a corona of light around him for an instant, and then it fades, and he is just Adam again, but Ronan will never forget the way Adam had felt with his power beating against Ronan’s skin.

_”Gratias tibi.”_ Adam’s voice is hoarse with surprise.

“We have to do at least one more today,” Ronan says. “This place is special, and I’ve left the path open to connect it to the next node, but we can’t leave it vulnerable even overnight, the prickly bushes will creep in and start trying to tear it apart again if we do. It’s getting late, and we may have to walk back to the car in the dark, but do you think you can?” 

“After _that_?” Adam asks, gesturing toward the bucket, which he has left balanced on the lip of the well. “I think I might be able to work all night.”

_Gratias tibi,_ the trees whisper their thanks, and tell them again that the well will help their other gardens grow.

_”Gratias tibi,”_ Ronan says in return, because they had taken from him what they had needed, but they had given it all back and more.

Adam has gathered up his cards and is shuffling them. He draws one.

The Sun.

Ronan feels something tight between his shoulderblades relaxing as he sees the card come up. The Stand is a special place, like the Grove, but Ronan thinks it’s stronger, that if what is under the pond in the Grove is a wellspring of power, then what flows from the Stand will be like a geyser of power.

They both linger, they can’t help it. This is a good place to be, it feels good to stay here, but eventually Ronan empties what’s left in the bucket back into the well, and then drops the bucket itself over and into the water, not sure why, but with the vague kind of idea that nothing will be able to use the water from the well, even with the rope attached to the bucket, if the bucket itself is in the water.

When they leave through the narrow gap that Ronan had left in the wall, they pile stones high around this part of the path, just to make sure the wall can’t be broached, and Ronan guides them further south and west. “It’s going to be a little further a hike this time, maybe a mile or a little more, do we have enough rocks?”

“Yeah, we still have plenty. We wouldn’t have run out so quickly before except we used a lot of them in the fight against the shadows in the Grove,” Adam tells him. He drags the bag of rocks out of the Cabeswater repair kit, and Ronan sees that it’s still about three quarters of the way full. They fill their pockets with rocks again, and start in the direction that Ronan points them. They keep the stones piled high and all touching while they are still near the Stand, planning to keep the wall on this part of the path high, just in case, but as they walk through what is a fairly pleasant patch of Henrietta woodland, they slowly let the piles of rocks dwindle down to what they usually use, reassured a little by the fact that there is not a prickly bush in sight. Sweat dries on Ronan’s skin, leaving him wishing for a shower, but honestly, if that’s the worst thing that happens to them today, he’ll take it and be grateful for it. Eventually the woodland opens into scrubland, not nearly as pleasant a walk, and then, inevitably, the prickly bushes start showing up, not packed very densely together, but scattered throughout the scrub. 

The marker for the next node in Ronan’s head is a lone spur of granite that juts out of the ground at an acute angle, almost like a lone piece of what used to be a butte a thousand years ago, and that spur of granite is just what is left of it, looking a bit like a pointing finger. By the time they reach it, the prickly bushes are strongly in evidence, though nowhere as dense as they had been around some of the nodes they had found. Ronan shovels them out of the path and pitches them out into the scrub when they get in his way, but he doesn’t execute a real attack on them the way he had done at some of their other gardens.

They circle around the spur of granite three times when they get to it, looking for something Cabeswater-like -- the markers Ronan dreams of are usually pretty close to the nodes they are looking for -- before Adam thinks to get down on his hands and knees and crawl under the jutting bottom edge of the granite outcropping, and doesn’t appear on the other side. Ronan arranges another handful of stones to line up with the bottom of the outcropping, and then gets down on his own hands and knees and scrambles his way beneath it and out the other side, and finds himself crawling out onto long green grass that is soft under his hands. He gets to his feet, being careful not to knock himself senseless on the underside of the outcropping of granite, and takes a look around.

The ground slopes gently downward into a mostly oval shaped bowl, and the grass gives way to a springy green thicket of bushes that reaches about to Ronan’s chest. At the bottom-most part of the bowl is a small cluster of rowan trees. The little dell smells strongly of green growing things, and Ronan kind of expects some kind of pond or spring in the middle of the rowans, because when trees grow in a grouping like that, it’s often because there is a source of water in the middle of it, but when he and Adam push their way through the thicket, which is dense, but made mostly of bushes with long, whippy branches that don’t catch on clothes or skin, and are thus pretty easy to push through, there is no spring or pond. There is a roughly hewn, age-pitted granite table or altar, built low to the ground, and almost as wide as it is long. There are no markings on it that Ronan can see, and the surface of it is not stained with anything like old blood, such as it might be if it had actually been used as an altar at some point. It’s just sitting there at the lowest point in the dell, surrounded by the rowans and the thicket as if for protection.

Ronan moves a little closer to it, meaning to get a better look, but Adam catches his arm. “That table is a place of power,” he says, and Ronan sees that Adam’s eyes have gotten that dreaming and yet very present look that they sometimes get. “Don’t get too close to it until I can try to find out what kind of power it’s meant to hold.”

Ronan stops where he is obediently, though he doesn’t get a sense of anything at all from the table. He has to assume it’s something Adam can sense because he is the Magician. Adam kneels on the ground and pulls out his cards, shuffles, and lays out three.

The Hermit. Strength. The Lovers.

“The Hermit is about spirituality,” Adam says. “It’s a vague kind of spirituality because it can mean anything from your own personal spiritual frame of mind to the entirety of a specific religion. Strength in the context of the Hermit is about using your powers or abilities for the good of as many people or things as are within your sphere of influence. And The Lovers is about partnership, either platonic or romantic.” Adam sits back on his heels and rubs his thumb lightly across his lower lip. Ronan looks away. He really feels like that gesture shouldn’t affect him so much since he knows who Adam picked it up from, but it never fails to cause Ronan’s belly to knot with a low, pleasant heat.

To distract himself from looking at it, Ronon looks around for prickly bushes, and doesn’t see any within sight from the rowans. He presses his way back through the thicket, and he can see a few hovering at the edges of the dell, where the land starts to drop away, but none of them intrude into the dip in the land where the table resides. He ponders that while he pushes his way back through the thicket and hunkers down next to where Adam is still sitting back on his heels, surveying his reading.

“I think this might have been a place of worship for Pagans at one time,” Adam says, and Ronan sees that he’s blushing faintly. “They’re one of the few religions that used sex as a form of worship and as a way to summon power. I don’t think it’s dangerous to us, but I’m also not sure what exactly to do with it. Out in the open like this, I’d expect it to be a target for the prickly bushes, but they seem to mostly stay out of the dip in the land that the table rests in. It could mean that the table itself contains enough residual power to keep this place mostly intact, and to maintain its little piece of Cabeswater.” 

“I checked while you were doing your thing,” Ronan says. “I can see a few up where the land is higher, but there are none in this little dell. How much power? I mean, how long can this piece of Cabeswater hold itself together without us?”

Adam bites his lower lip. “I’m not sure. _I_ can still feel its power, but I wouldn’t say it’s putting out a lot of power. Just kind of a low grade area of effect protection of the Dell itself. There’s no way to tell when he last time this thing has been used. Although it wants to be used. I suspect that any time people that are at least moderately attracted to one another get close enough to it, they use it.” 

“Use it how?” Ronan asks.

“By having sex on it, Ronan, don’t be dense!” Adam snaps, and then lays a hand on Ronan’s arm. “I’m sorry. I can feel the energy it’s putting off, it’s kind of messing with my head.”

“So why aren’t we using it?” Ronan asks.

“I’m pretty sure just because I stopped us from getting too close to it before it could start affecting our minds,” Adam says. “Well, your mind. I think my magic is kind of sympathetic to the magic of the table, so it affects me from a little further away.”

“So the table wants you to have sex with me?” Ronan asks.

Adam throws him a sideways look. “I already want to have sex with you,” he says. “The table is just amplifying when and how I want to do it.”

“Is this something that we should consider doing?” Ronan asks, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “If the table hasn’t been used in a long time, and it’s still got the power to keep this piece of Cabeswater both present, and mostly free of the prickly bushes, then if we’re going to include it in the circle of our gardens, it seems like it might be in our best interests to make sure it has more power available to it.”

Adam looks over at him, his eyes wide. “I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to include this as one of our gardens,” Adam says, and licks his lips. “Especially if we even intend to show them to anyone else. Imagine if Blue and Gansey were to ever get to close to that thing.”

“Ew, thank you for that mental image,” Ronan says, frowning as he tries to banish all thoughts of Blue and Gansey from his mind. “I understand what you’re saying, Adam, but we almost _have_ to connect this place, both because it’s the only other one I know that will help us make a circle, since we can’t use the valley with the spirit paths in it, and we have to connect the last place we were at to something to protect it. I’m pretty sure the Stand is one of the most powerful places we’ve found so far, and I’m almost certain that if we don’t protect it from every vantage, it’s going to come under attack by the prickly bushes.”

Adam says nothing for a very long minute. “I’m still not sure us doing things together for Cabeswater is good for us in the real world,” Adam says finally. “I know it would have gone wrong if we had done it because of the dreaming tree, but we’ve… we’ve been together since then, so I’m not sure if it would matter one way or another now. I do know I need to get back away from that table fairly soon, or I’m going to stop being able to think reasonably about it one way or the other.” Adam’s voice sounds a little strained at that.

“Get your cards, and we’ll go back out of the thicket,” Ronan says, and watches Adam’s normally poised and graceful fingers fumble at the three cards he’d laid out before managing to get them tucked back into his deck, and then Ronan takes him by the arm and pulls him to his feet, dragging him back away from the table and through the whippy branches of the thicket until they are standing near the edge of the Dell.

Adam casts his gaze around the edges of the dip in the ground, and Ronan can tell he’s looking at the prickly bushes, considering how close they are, trying to decide if doing this is worth the risk of making things somehow more complicated in the real world.

Ronan thinks about it, too. He doesn’t think it’s going to make a difference. He wants Adam now, and he’s going to want Adam outside of Cabeswater’s sphere of influence as well. He understands that Adam may have a different perspective on it, having felt the power of the table first hand. “You said that the Strength card in this context means using your powers and abilities to make things better for all people and things within your sphere of influence,” Ronan says finally, when Adam hasn’t spoken for at least five minutes. He works hard to say it as close to exactly the way that Adam had phrased it as possible.

“I did, yes. That’s what it usually means, anyway. It can be a lot more literal than that, but what it really means is to be strong, and to use your strength to do good.”

“And when you did your reading, when you chose your cards, what was the question you had in your mind?” Ronan asks.

“It’s always the same question, doing this,” Adam says. “I just want to know about the place we are at and what to do in that place to make it stronger.”

Adam’s gaze raises itself from somewhere in the middle of Ronan’s chest to meet Ronan’s gaze. “The reading is pretty clear,” he says. “The information it gave me, I mean, is fairly easy to interpret.”

“So the advice the cards are giving you is what?” Ronan asks.

“To use the table to make this place stronger,” Adam says evenly. “I still have concerns.”

“I have wanted you since before we knew Cabeswater even existed,” Ronan says, keeping his voice calm and steady. “I understand why you said what we might have done in the Clearing because of the dreaming tree would have… twisted us up. But things have changed since then. I’m not going to stop wanting you if we do this. I’m also not going to be upset if you decide you don’t want to do this. But if we don’t, I think we have to seal off the path before we climbed down into the Dell, wall it off to protect the Stand and the well, and give me another night to try to dream of in-between places that we might be able to use to connect all of our pieces of Cabeswater. We can’t use the valley with the spirit paths, and none of the other places we know about so far are places that are going to help us connect anything else.”

Adam bites at his lower lip, his cheeks flushed, but he doesn’t stop meeting Ronan’s gaze.

“But you think this is the best way,” he says, not making it a question. He runs one hand through his light brown hair, mussing it a little.

“I think it’s the easiest way right now to protect the Stand and the well,” Ronan says. “I didn’t feel the power of the table the way you did, though, so I’m willing to admit that I could be wrong about the best thing to do here.”

“Isn’t doing something like this, which is pagan ritual sex magic, not to put too fine a point on it, a little bit against your religion?” Adam demands. 

“I’m not a very good Catholic anyway,” Ronan says. “I think God will forgive me for using my strength to protect the well.”

Adam tries one last thing. “I don’t know how much control we’ll really have over what we do while we’re on that table,” he says. “It’s old, and a power focus. It could render us into something like mindless vessels it uses to create and store power.”

“Do you think that’s likely?” Ronan asks.

“No,” Adam says, a little unwillingly. “I don’t think it works that way. I think you have to give yourself over to what you do spiritually, which is to say, with a willing spirit, for the table to able to take power from anything we do on it. That’s the only thing I can think of that The Hermit is likely to mean in context with the other two cards.”

Adam gives him a long and steady look, and then takes his hand, and drags him through the thicket with him so quickly that Ronan doesn’t have time to get a hand up to defend his face from the whippy branches of the bushes. He rushes through the ring of rowans at much the same pace. He stops when they are standing right next to the table, and he turns his gaze on Ronan and looks at him hard.

From this close, Ronan can feel the draw of the table, he can feel the craving it pulses into his body from its aged and pitted stone surface. He is instantly hard, and also intensely aware of Adam and of Adam’s body, lean and lithe, and smelling a little of sweat from a physically active day. He feels drawn both to Adam and to the table at once, and he catches Adam’s wrist and turns to sit on the table, planning to drag Adam onto it with him.

Adam catches him by both forearms and refuses to let him sit, and after just a moment, Ronan’s head clears a little, though he still feels almost dazed with need. He doesn’t want Adam to stop this.

Adam, apparently having made up his mind, doesn’t try. 

He says, “Take off your clothes, first, Ronan,” and his gaze is hot as it wanders up and down Ronan’s body. Ronan has to drag his gaze away from that hot look on Adam’s face to be able to do anything but stare at it, but then he slowly bends and unties his boots, tugging them off, and then his sweaty socks. When he unbuttons his jeans and starts to pull them down, rocks rain from the pockets, and Ronan glances up to see that Adam has his shirt off, and is just now pulling down his jeans, and that rocks scatter out of his pockets as well. He laughs, and Adam laughs, too, and Ronan notes that the laughter both feels real and unreal, the sound and feel of it is distant, unimportant, while he peels his jeans the rest of the way off and then drags his tank top off over his head. His underwear had apparently come off with the jeans, or he just doesn’t remember taking them off. He is busy, anyway, busy with his eyes on Adam’s body, dragging them across every plane and hollow of his chest and belly, dropping down to see his cock standing erect, swaying heavily between his thighs. 

Adam climbs onto the surface of the table on his knees and sits back on his heels, and says, “Ronan,” a beckoning, and Ronan climbs up to mirror his pose. Being on the table does not give him any additional sexual knowledge, which he is distractedly disappointed by, but it nullifies any kind of embarrassment or hesitation, and he leans in and kisses Adam at the same time as he wraps a hand around Adam’s cock, stroking the length of him, and finding him hot and hard, the skin like sleek silk. Adam moans into his mouth, and reaches for and finds Ronan’s cock, and his hand is ridged with callouses and closes around him with just the right amount of force, just on the right side of being too hard. Their mouths work at one another’s, Ronon thrusting his tongue between Adam’s lips and Adam biting gently at it, while their hands work on one another, Ronon’s grip tight, stroking in long, smooth motions, while Adam’s hand around Ronan does almost the same thing, only with shorter, faster strokes. 

Ronan smells Adam’s skin, and wants to taste it, but he doesn’t want Adam to stop touching him, so he turns them both on the table -- it’s plenty wide enough -- so he can lean down and put his mouth on Adam’s cock. Adam gasps, his hand on Ronan’s cock suddenly gripping even harder, and Ronan opens his mouth and licks at the shaft of Adam’s cock, tasting sweat and smelling a scent that merely seems to be male, nothing else identifying about it, just the strong scent of a male. Adam’s hand is moving on Ronan’s cock again, and he is making low, almost helpless noises as Ronan licks up and down the shaft of his cock, and then Ronan slips his mouth over the head, tasting something saltier than merely skin and moaning a little at the taste, and then shifting on the table to get a better angle, so that he can slide some of Adam’s length into his mouth. 

Adam’s breathing is coming in hitching little gasps, and his hand has gone a little looser around Ronan’s cock, but still feels better than almost anything Ronan has ever felt, and Ronan lets his tongue explore the shape of Adam’s cock, feeling the swell of the head, running his tongue along the bottom of the head, where the glans smooths into the shaft, which is a place that is a sweet spot for Ronan, and Adam shouts softly as though in surprise, and then makes another noise that almost sounds like a sob. Ronan merely takes him deeper, pressing his tongue hard against the big vein that runs along the underside of Adam’s cock, and Adam is whispering, “Ronan, Ronan, you have to stop, I’m going to come,” and Ronan almost doesn’t stop, almost just lets Adam come in his mouth, he’s thought about it often enough, but then he does stop because Adam had asked him to, and he wants this to be good for Adam, so he takes him into his hand again, slick now with Ronan’s spit, and Adam’s hand is dragging up and down Ronan’s cock, his own grip a little slicked with Ronan’s precome, and then Adam is coming and Ronan’s face is still right there, so he gets to watch Adam’s cock jerk and the come spurt out twice, landing on Ronan’s chest, and then just spills down the backs of Ronan’s fingers while Adam shudders, his fist stuttering out of rhythm on Ronan’s cock, but Ronan doesn’t mind. Adam’s hand on him is still one of the best things he has ever felt, and he lets Adam’s cock go and runs his tongue through the slick warm mess Adam had made on the backs of his fingers. 

Adam doesn’t even breathe for several seconds, and Ronan looks up, tasting the flat metal and bitter salt taste of Adam’s come from off of his own fingers, and Adam is watching him, his face twisted with lust, his hand actually stilling completely around Ronan for several long seconds, until Ronan arches his hips and pushes his cock through the tight curl of Adam’s fist, and then Adam starts moving his hand again, short, hard tugs that make Ronan’s balls draw up tight between his thighs and his hips jerk in time with Adam’s hand wrapped around his cock, and then it feels like his spine goes hot and liquid and the root of his belly twists and clenches, and then he is shooting his come against the stone of the table, crying out a little at the sudden strength of it, and Adam’s grip around him eases slowly, working him through the aftershocks, and then finally loosens and lets him go entirely.

They stare at each other, Ronan still with his body half on his side, half curled downward, so that he could reach Adam with his mouth, Adam also mostly on his side, his arm at a slightly awkward angle. Ronan can feel the rush of his orgasm still like an echo, and realizes it’s actually buzzing against his skin from the stone of the table, that it’s power that he’s feeling, not just really good afterglow. Adam’s eyes are half-lidded, making him look both a little predatory and a little satiated at the same time, and he’s breathing hard, and they are both still physically wrapped up enough around one another to feel that they are both trembling or shaking or maybe both.

“Let me use your shirt to clean the come off my hand,” Adam says, his voice a husky demand.

“For once, you should have to be the one to sacrifice a shirt while doing obscure arcane shit, Parrish,” Ronan says, but leans down and reaches as far as he can, just barely snagging his tank top with the tips of his fingers. He wipes the come off of his chest before he hands the tank top to Adam to wipe off his hand.

Ronan can feel himself hardening again, and says, “I think it might be a good idea to get off the table now,” and Adam nods a swift agreement. They climb down, and Ronan realizes that he doesn’t have a single scraped or raw place on his body, like one might expect to get from having sex on a big slab of stone. He ponders that as he locates his underwear and then pulls on his jeans. He sits on the ground to pull on his unpleasantly damp socks, and then to tug on and lace up his boots. 

Adam is sitting on the ground a few feet away, lacing up his jogging shoes.

“So do you hate me for making you do that?” Ronan asks, worried enough that he has to actually ask the question.

Adam laughs. “Yes. Damn you for sucking my cock, Lynch!” he says, and his cheeks flush bright red, but there is nothing but amusement and affection on his face when he looks at Ronan, and Ronan feels himself relax.

“Never happen again, Parrish,” he says, and Adam laughs again, and doesn’t even pretend to think that Ronan means it.

It’s almost dusk by the time they leave the Dell, first searching out a path to get out in the fading light, and eventually finding a patch of scrub that leads to about a quarter of a mile of more scrub, and then they’re walking in a field again. Ronan marks the path out of the Dell with stones that had spilled from their pockets, just so that he can be sure they will be able to find their way back in again.

“I didn’t see a single prickly bush from anywhere in the Dell when I walked around it… after,” Adam says as they’re crossing the field to get back to the BMW.

“You scared them all away with your yowling,” he says, which isn’t accurate at all, as Adam is actually pretty quiet during sex so far.

“I did not yowl!” Adam snaps indignantly, and Ronan snickers at the expression on his face.

The walk to the car turns out to be surprisingly not very far, and Ronan muses, “It would be better to get one more in-between point somewhere between the Glade and the Dell, but if we can’t come up with anything, they could be linked up. It would be a long path, but it could be done.”

“I’m still kind of pissed about the valley not working out,” Adam says. “Especially the part where it’s because it would be dangerous to me but not to you.”

“They didn’t say that, exactly,” Ronan defends the trees. “They said the place couldn’t be used because of the spirit paths, guarded by the dead. I get the idea anyone _but_ me would have been in danger, not just you, and that maybe if we had connected it up to the rest of the gardens, it would have put the rest of them in danger, too. We don’t want dead guardians wandering through our gardens, Parrish.” Ronan keeps his voice light, and to his relief, Adam lets out a snort of amusement.

They drive home in the dark, and Adam lets Ronan play his music as loudly as he wants to without complaining. Adam bangs around in the kitchen until he finds everything he needs to make pasta with sauce from a jar, and Ronan doesn’t tell him that sauce from a jar is for heathens and he doesn’t even know how that got there, and he can do _much_ better, because he’s hungry, and he’ll just make sure to make the sauce himself next time, as he doesn’t get the idea that Adam’s mom had been the type to make homemade sauce, or that his dad had been the type to let his son learn to make it, even if she had. It’ll work out. Ronan’s mom had loved to cook, and she had been happy to teach Ronan anything he had wanted to know, asserting that men that knew how to cook made the best husbands. 

His throat tightens at the thought of his mom, and he swallows past it and pushes it back. Looking at Adam, eating pasta and sauce without getting a drop of sauce on his chin, helps to dull the helpless wanting feeling that blooms hollowly in his chest when he thinks of either of his parents. He has almost gotten to the point where he doesn’t think about Niall Lynch every day, but the loss of his mother is still a raw, sore spot that takes him by surprise at least two or three times a day, even though in a way, she had been lost to him for almost as long as his father had been. He had had her back, though, briefly, and he mourns that he hadn’t been with her more while he’d had her back than he thinks he actually mourns her as his mother. It’s a tangled thread of guilt and longing and grief that he doesn’t want to end the day with, so he watches Adam eat instead.

“We’ll have to take you to buy groceries soon,” he says, when they’ve finished the entire pot of pasta. “I wasn’t stocked up for feeding two, and we’re already out of most breakfast things. Besides, I don’t even know what you like to eat. It will be an educational outing.”

“Don’t forget I have to work tomorrow,” Adam says. “Just in the morning, though. We can grocery shop after I get off. Then we might still have time to find one more node.”

“I’ll try to dream something in-between tonight,” Ronan says, and crushes his instant jealousy of Adam spending time anywhere but with him. He’s going to have to get used to it. Adam is going to Stanford in a couple of months. He doesn’t think that will be the end of them; he senses in Adam the same thing he knows for certain about himself. An inability to be fickle or casual. That a heart, once given, can be safely left in his care. 

Sometimes Ronan’s faith in that is greater than at other times, but for the most part, he doesn’t fear Adam going away and never coming back to Ronan. He doesn’t know what they’ll do after Stanford; he knows Adam won’t want to come back to live at the Barns, he’ll want to make something of himself, he’ll want to _be_ something more. And Ronan doesn’t want to leave the Barns, but he could maybe do so on a semi-permanent basis, like maybe live somewhere else and have the Barns be their summer home.

Ronan would like to tell Adam that there isn’t anything more important for him to _be_ than Adam Parrish, Cabeswater’s Magician. Some day in the future, Adam might even figure that out on his own, if they actually do somehow manage to recover Cabeswater itself. But for right now, that’s not enough for Adam, and Ronan has to learn to be generous for Adam’s spirit, to be patient enough to let Adam do the things he feels like he needs to do. And the Barns isn’t going anywhere. 

And for right now, at least, being Cabeswater’s Magician is the most important thing on Adam’s list of things he wants to be. Spending his time with Ronan doing what Ronan most wants to do is also what Adam wants for right now. Ronan will take it and treat it like a gift, and he’ll figure out how to deal with the future once the future comes around.

For now, what he has of Adam is enough.

“Sleep with me tonight, Ronan?” Adam asks.

“And on any other night you’ll let me,” Ronan answers at once, and Adam’s smile is small and sweet and genuine, and Ronan thinks that it’s more than enough.

Ronan wakes with two in-between points, and the idea that they are getting close. He isn’t sure if that idea is because two in-between points will be enough to create a circle of gardens, and that the Dreaming Ring can be moved to wherever it needs to be in the circle to use its force to help draw Cabeswater back, or if it’s an actual feeling. He remembers the beginning of it all, he remembers dreaming Chainsaw and sensing that things were starting. He isn’t sure this is the same kind of sense, or if it’s just the knowledge that if even one of his in-between nodes work out, they’ll be able to close their circle of gardens today.

He is sprawled out on his back in Adam’s bed, and Adam is tucked into his side, his cheek resting on Ronan’s chest, his hair tickling along the edge of Ronan’s jaw. He keeps as still as he can, just letting himself have this moment, knowing that Adam will have to get up soon and go to work, and that Ronan might have to argue with him to get him to let Ronan take him in the BMW and drop him off, and then pick him up again, because he doesn’t want Adam grocery shopping on his own. He wants to make sure that Adam knows that Ronan can cook, and that they get the things he needs so that he _can_ cook for them, and he wants to make sure Adam doesn’t bring home a trunk full of instant noodles or boxes of mac and cheese. 

He is pretty sure Adam is going to be appalled at how much groceries are going to cost to feed the two of them, because Ronan will refuse to grocery shop at Wal-Mart, will take them instead to Wade’s, and will buy all the things he needs to make full meals as well as getting his sandwich makings from the deli, instead of the pre-packaged stuff that Adam is no doubt used to. Ronan doesn’t exactly feel bad about this, Adam had known without an iota of doubt that Ronan would never let them grocery shop at Wal-Mart anyway, so Adam probably expects it to be more expensive, but he does feel a little cautious about it. On the one hand, he expects to eat as well as he wants to in his own home, and that requires a certain amount of monetary output, which Adam had insisted that he be the one to outlay. On the other hand, he understands that spending a couple of hundred dollars on groceries is going to be a kind of culture shock for Adam, and he wishes he could think of some way to ease him into it.

Even with what they’re going to end up spending, Ronan knows exactly how much Adam had been paying for the shithole, and it’s still going to be less. 

Adam’s phone alarm beeps -- it was pretty much the first function Adam had learned to use -- and he stirs, throwing one of his thighs over the top of one of Ronan’s and pressing his face against Ronan’s chest as though it might help him escape the inevitability of the alarm. Finally he shifts up onto an elbow, looking down into Ronan’s face with a little smile when he sees that Ronan is already awake, and then rolls over onto his back to reach for the phone on the bedside table to turn the alarm off.

“Good morning,” Adam says, his voice a little sleep roughened, which makes it a little deeper and more intimate somehow.

“Hey,” Ronan says. “Sleep okay?”

“I dreamed of being at work,” Adam says, his tone conveying disgust. “I hate it when I do that. Then it feels like I woke up from working all night just to go back to work.”

“If we’re going to grocery shop today, I’ll drop you off at work and pick you up so that we can go together,” Ronan half-states, half-offers.

“There’s no reason for you to drive all that way. We can meet at Wade’s when I get off and take both cars back,” Adam offers, but he doesn’t sound like he’s got his heart set on it.

“I don’t mind, and I’d have to go into town anyway to get some kind of food to eat for breakfast. I can keep myself busy while you’re at work for four hours and then pick you up so we can grocery shop together,” Ronan says.

“If you want,” Adam says, not sounding concerned about it one way or the other, which makes Ronan relax a little bit. “If you got really bored, you could try dreaming on the ley line.”

Ronan considers the idea. “I might,” he says finally. “It’s always a little weird, dreaming in the car. Once my father took me on a roadtrip to a country faire and I fell asleep in the car, and when I woke up the back seat was full of chickens.” His father had laughed and pulled over and gently herded the birds out of the car and onto some farmer’s property, and hadn’t acted like anything at all unusual had happened. Ronan hadn’t realized that he’d dreamed those chickens until years later. He’d thought his father had stopped and got them somewhere for some reason. The logic of a four or five year old.

Adam laughs. “I’ve got to get in the shower,” he says, and turns to drop a light kiss on Ronan’s surprised mouth, before turning immediately away to roll out of bed. He gathers up clean clothes out of the dresser and crosses the hall to the bathroom in his underwear, which for some reason both warms and amuses Ronan. He lounges in bed for another five minutes or so, mostly just because the bed still smells like Adam, and then goes down the hall and into the bathroom off of his bedroom and takes his own shower, pulling on black jeans and a white tank top. 

He checks his phone, and sees that he has two missed calls from Declan and one from Matthew, and frowns a little. Declan had taken Matthew and Opal to Washington to stay with him for the summer, Opal having been included in this against Ronan’s better judgement because Matthew is completely devoted to teaching Opal everything about how to live outside a magical forest. Declan hadn’t been all that thrilled with the idea either, but they had both been pretty much steamrolled by Matthew’s enthusiasm for the project. Ronan had suggested that both Matthew and Opal stay with him at the Barns, but Declan had been firm about not leaving Matthew with Ronan for two months. Besides that, Declan had developed some kind of freakish fondness for Opal, and honestly, neither of the elder Lynch brothers has ever had much in the way of a resistance built up against indulging Matthew’s whims.

He calls Declan, who answers on the second ring, and says, “Opal has been having bad dreams. She says that you’re going to make her go back and live in the forest.” There is no accusation in Declan’s tone, but the lack is almost an accusation in itself. Declan thinks he’s up to something, and he’s right, of course, and he wants to check in his oh-so-uptight way that whatever it is Ronan is up to isn’t going to cause them any problems. Ronan may never entirely forgive Declan for being Declan, but things between them have been carefully cordial bordering on a return to remembered affection since Ronan and Matthew had almost died, and Ronan doesn’t really doubt that Declan’s intentions here are good. He just wants to protect the core of his family, which now somehow includes Opal, and only mostly includes Ronan, because Ronan is sometimes a threat to himself and those around him.

“I’m not going to make the little urchin go live anywhere,” Ronan says flatly. “If you can’t deal, you can bring her back here.”

“I didn’t say that. I just think she’ll feel better if you tell her you’re not going to make her ever go back and live in the forest,” Declan says stiffly. “She’s been having these dreams for the past few nights, and has been withdrawn and nervous during the days. Matthew is worried about her.”

“Can she use a phone now?” Ronan asks, a little surprised.

“She can do a lot of things now,” Declan says, sounding both pleased and a little pompous at the same time. “She even goes out with us to places, since you made her the shoes that hide her hooves.”

Ronan had dreamed her several sets, and Declan knows that’s how Ronan had gotten them, but will never say so.

“Let me talk to her, I’ll make sure she knows she never has to live anywhere but with us ever again,” Ronan says.

There is the sound of the phone being passed off and a little inexplicable thumping from the other end, and then Opal is saying, “Ronan, quare venistis ad me in somnis silvarum?” in sobbing little breaths that make it quite clear that she’s crying.

“I’m not going to take you back into the dream forest, Opal, you never have to go back there again if you don’t want to. Speak English,” Ronan says.

“But you are trying to get the forest back,” Opal hiccups forlornly, and Ronan sighs, thinking he should have somehow expected that she’d sense that they were doing something.

“Because we want the forest back, but not to make you go live in it. You will always live with Matthew or Declan or me. I will never make you set foot in it if you don’t want to, you little urchin, I promise.”

“I want to stay with Declan and Matthew,” Opal whimpers. “For the summer. And then come back to Kerah! I don’t want you to bring the forest back. I don’t want to be trapped in the dream forest again.”

“I’m telling you, that is never going to happen. I brought you out of the dream forest, and even if we bring the real forest back, you never have to go there if you don’t want to. I will want to go there sometimes because it’s a special place for me, but you never have to go anywhere near it. And you can live with any of us that you want to live with, urchin. If you want to come back to the Barns now, either Declan will bring you or I’ll come and get you.”

“I don’t want to come back while you’re trying to bring the forest back!” she cries, her voice so high pitched that it seems to leave a slight ringing in the ear he’s got the phone up to. “I might get trapped in the gardens.”

“The gardens are nice places, Opal,” Ronan tries, and she makes an anguished sound, so he quickly adds, “but you never have to visit them at all if you don’t want to. Adam and I are just working on them, that’s all, but that doesn’t have anything to do with where you live. You live with us now.”

“Do you promise?” she demands, still whimpering a little bit.

“Yeah, you little urchin, I promise. Didn’t I show you the papers that say you’re our sister, and we’ll take care of you,” Ronan asks. He’d had to write the papers out using the puzzle box in the ancient language of trees before she had seemed to understand them, though how she’d learned to _read_ anything, let alone the ancient language of trees, is entirely beyond Ronan. He’d created legal documents as well, birth certificate, custody papers, anything they might need to prove that she was their sister, just in case something happened or someone got nosy.

“Matthew is teaching me to read English,” she says. “Et iterum aedificare silva visum est periculosum, Ronan. Periculosum est.”

“I know that it’s dangerous, but I have Adam to help me, you remember Adam. We watch out for each other, so rebuilding the dream forest is safe when we are together,” Ronan says slowly.

“Adam,” she repeats. “Magus.” She is quiet on her end of the line for a few long seconds, and then she says, “Adam would be a good helper, if you were going to bring back the forest. But it is still dangerous, Ronan. There are places in the dream forest that aren’t safe even for the Greywaren.”

“I promise I’ll be careful,” Ronan tells her. “Do you need me to come get you?”

“No, I want to stay here!” she almost shouts. “At least until you aren’t working on the forest anymore.”

“Okay, whatever you want,” Ronan says. “But I promise, you never have to go near the forest if it comes back, or even to the gardens, if that’s all we can ever rebuild.”

“I don’t want to be a dream creature again,” she sighs, but she’s calmer now.

“You won’t be. I promise,” Ronan tells her. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she says. “Be careful.”

“I will. Let me talk to Declan again.” He waits, and hears her pass the phone back over.

“Are you doing something stupid and dangerous I should be worried about, Ronan?” Declan asks, but without any real malice in the question.

“Nothing stupid, and probably not that dangerous. It’s just a project I’m working on. She says she wants to stay there with you, but if you need me to, I can come and get her,” Ronan offers.

“Oh God, Matthew would hate us both forever if we took her away from him,” Declan says, sounding both amused and a little consternated at the idea. “I’m pretty sure he loves her more than he loves both of us, now.”

“Okay, then. If she has any more bad dreams, remind her that I promised her that she never has to go back into the forest, no matter what,” Ronan suggests.

“I’ll try it,” Declan says. Then he adds, “Whatever you’re doing, I agree with her. You should be careful, Ronan.”

“I’m careful,” Ronan insists, nerves a little frayed from the whole conversation. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got it under control.”

“Okay, then. We’ll see you at Mass day after tomorrow.” Declan hangs up.

“Is it Friday?” Ronan asks Adam, who is hovering in the doorway of his bedroom, dressed in his coveralls and looking concerned.

“Yes, Ronan, it’s Friday,” Adam says. “What was that all about?” Adam glances at his watch and shakes his head. “You know what, tell me in the car. We barely have time to get there as it is.”

So Ronan explains about Opal’s meltdown while he drives Adam to work, and they talk about how she could possibly know what they are doing down here, and more or less come to the conclusion that just being a dream creature connects her to what is left of Cabeswater, and that she can sense the two of them working with what’s left of it. It’s really the only explanation that makes any kind of sense. Ronan wonders if Chainsaw senses what they’re doing as well, and has been avoiding him while he’s doing it. Now that she’s fully grown, she tends to range a bit more than she had when she was younger, but she usually shows up at least once a day to pester Ronan, and will sometimes stay with him without wandering for several days at a time. The last time he had seen her had been at Fox Way, and that had been several days ago.

He worries about that silently, just to himself, and drops Adam off at Boyd’s just in time for the start of his shift.

Ronan had intended to stay in town while Adam worked his four hour shift, but he decides instead to drive back to the Barns and keep himself outside, where Chainsaw can find him easily, in case she comes looking. He feels guilty for not having thought about her in three days or so. It’s not the longest she’s spent away from him, but it’s close.

He doesn’t have anything he especially needs to do outside, so he just settles himself into a hammock that, if you look closely, seems to have just grown naturally between two trees back behind the house. He doesn’t sleep or even doze, he just thinks about what they’re doing, about what they have done, and Chainsaw finds him there about an hour after he’d come outside, tries to land on his shoulder, and gets her wings fouled on the viney ropes of the hammock. Ronan captures her flapping wings carefully between both hands and untangles her, then sits up and lets her go. She flaps upward and circles, cawing indignantly for several seconds, and then comes to settle on his shoulder. “Kerah!” she says, and he runs one fingertip along the sleek feathers on the top of her head.

“Yeah, and where have you been? Are you going to bitch at me about trying to bring back Cabeswater, too?” Ronan demands, and she nips at his ear gently. Since he can’t lie back down in the hammock with her on his shoulder and she doesn’t seem inclined to go anywhere, Ronan stands up and starts walking from barn to barn, willing to do nothing disguised as makework as long as she’s willing to stay with him, which turns out to be for most of the morning.

By the time he needs to be leaving to pick up Adam, Ronan has idled away half of the day, and is feeling a little frustrated and bored. When he heads for the BMW, Chainsaw caws at him in clear disapproval, and launches herself off of his shoulder to take to the sky.

Adam has stripped off the coveralls by the time Ronan get’s to Boyd’s, and is wearing jeans and a thin black t-shirt that Ronan wants to smooth across with his hands to feel the bone and muscle hiding underneath it. He tucks the coveralls into the trunk, because he doesn’t want to get anything from the coveralls onto Ronan’s upholstery. Ronan couldn’t care less, but Adam does, so Ronan doesn’t argue with him.

“So. Grocery shopping,” Adam says, with just a hint of dread in his voice. There is humor there, too, as if he knows that feeling dread over something as mundane as grocery shopping is silly, but it is humor that doesn’t deny that there still is a little bit of dread there.

“I can cook,” Ronan says. “You should know, because it means I’ll want to buy things I can cook meals with, and not just, you know, whatever kinds of instant meals most people that can’t cook live off of. Do you cook at all?”

“I can mostly feed myself out of a box,” Adam says, just a little defensively. “But I wouldn’t say that I really cook meals the way that, you know, your mom might have cooked meals. I’m okay with you picking out most of what we get according to what kinds of meals you want to cook. You shouldn’t worry about what to buy. You should just pick out what you would get if you were shopping for things for yourself. I knew when I made the deal that groceries for you meant something different than groceries for me.” Now his shoulders are hunched a little self-consciously.

“I just don’t want this to be some kind of traumatic experience for you,” Ronan says. “I’ve seen what you kept in your cupboards at your place, and we won’t be getting stuff like that, mostly, unless there’s some of it you especially like. You should get what you like to cook for you, too. I won’t want to make every meal we eat. Sometimes we’ll just want to fend for ourselves, which is why I tend to keep plenty of sandwich makings on hand. So that if I don’t feel like cooking anything complicated, I still have something I can put together real fast. But neither of us goes hungry. So if you like instant mac and cheese for snacks, then you should by all means get instant mac and cheese, but for the most part, I’ll probably make dinner almost every night. Then there are either leftovers or sandwiches for lunches. And I think we can either one of us throw together a respectable breakfast, but if it turns out that you always burn the bacon, I’ll teach you how. Anything I know how to cook, I’ll teach you how if you want to know.” Ronan pauses, weaving his way through traffic to Wade’s. “You’re not going to spend as much for groceries for the two of us in a month as you did for rent on your… apartment, but. It’s going to be a lot more than you’ve ever spent on groceries just for yourself.”

“You’ve been worrying about this,” Adam says, sounding faintly amazed. “I mean, it’s something you have thought about how to reassure me about so that I don’t have a heart attack when we get to the register.” He smiles a little. “That’s kind of sweet, Ronan.”

Ronan isn’t sure how to respond to that, and so says, “I just know you’re not used to being able to get everything you want or even some of the things you need. That’s not going to happen while you stay with me.” His tone is a little fierce at that statement, but Ronan can’t quite throttle it in. “If you can’t afford to do this, I can, and I’ll barely notice the total at the register. I don’t want you worrying the whole time we shop that you’re biting into your reserves you’re holding onto for Stanford, either.” He shrugs uncertainly. “I know you feel like you have to pay your own way, and I don’t have a problem with letting you do that. But I also don’t have a problem paying your way occasionally just because you’re Adam Parrish, and I kind of like taking care of Adam Parrish.”

“Ronan, I won the Lawrence Scholarship for Composition, which pays out as soon as they declare the winner. It’s a ten thousand dollar scholarship. I got a few others, too. And every scholarship I won, I can try to win again next year, and then some. But they don’t take that money back just because you don’t spend it all on school. If I end up with five thousand dollars left over of that scholarship, it’s still my money, and I can do anything I want to with it. And there are still a few I went for that I don’t know if I won yet. My point being, I can afford your high quality grocery tastes for a couple of months over the summer, and I don’t see it cutting into what I have to live on while I’m at Stanford to any appreciable degree.”

They are sitting in the parking lot at Wade’s, Ronan having parked far enough down the row that it’s unlikely any other cars will try to park on either side of the BMW.

Adam is looking at him, one brow arched a little, his expression firm. “And for what it’s worth, I’d like to learn to cook. My meals are included in my scholarship to Stanford, so I don’t really need to learn any time soon, but it’s a skill a person probably ought to have if they can possibly manage it. So maybe take it easy on me with ingredients, because I’m a beginner, but if you’re willing to take the time, I’m willing to put in the work to learn.”

“Man, if you got a ten thousand dollar scholarship, why are you still driving the Hondayota?” Ronan asks, his lips quirked.

“Because it doesn’t use much gas, and it’s easy to keep it running, so I have no real need for a different car. And just because I won the Lawrence this year, doesn’t mean I’ll win it next year. I think I have a fairly good chance, because it’s something I’m good at, but even if I don’t, I qualify for the full Pell grant, too, so even if I don’t get a single other scholarship, I would still have an income to live on outside of the Stanford scholarship. But I will get other scholarships. One thing I know how to do is exhibit my education on paper, so there will be other scholarships. None of which is my point, anyway. My point is, I will probably be a little dismayed by the amount of money I’m about to spend on groceries, but I won’t be alarmed by it. I’m feeding two, for one thing, and not just myself, and I knew that you wouldn’t shop at Wal-Mart, so I already knew the cost was going to go up. As far as you being able to cook and wanting to buy the things you need to cook with, that’s just a bonus. I don’t actually enjoy living on instant noodles. I’ll pay a little more so that we can make real meals a couple of times a day. And I don’t burn bacon. I can cover almost any kind of breakfast cooking.”

Ronan grins at him. “Well, all right then, Parrish,” he says. “Let’s go inside and spend the fruits of your intellectual labors.”

“You are such a shithead, Lynch,” Adam says, but he is half-laughing as he says it, and they both get out of the car.

Adam doesn’t agonize over the prices on each item, which would have made the trip almost unbearable for Ronan. He just accepts that if Ronan says they need it, then they need it. He does get a few frozen dinners and such for himself, but not many, and he doesn’t seem to worry over the prices of these either. When they get to the deli, Adam’s eyes go a little wide at the amount of sliced cheeses and cold cuts that Ronan picks out, but after the first shock wears off, actually adds a half a pound of sliced salami to their order, which Ronan pronounces to be revolting, and Adam replies that Ronan isn’t paying for it, and so doesn’t get a vote. 

Ronan wonders if Adam likes gourmet breads, and Adam confesses to never having had any. Rather than buy loaves, though, Ronan buys mixes, because he owns a bread machine and enjoys fresh bread, and he may be trying to show off for Adam just a little. Plus you can’t buy fresh bread in bulk, really. It will either get stale or moldy too quickly. Easier to buy a single loaf of bread off the shelf to keep handy, and then make whatever else you need as you need it.

Adam pays the $214.37 for the groceries without so much as a blink of surprise. As they take their cart loaded with bags out to the BMW, he does ask, “And how long will that much food last us?”

“Barring things like milk and eggs that you might have to pick up more of between shopping trips, I think this will last us between three and four weeks. A lot of it depends on how much we end up eating, really, and I’m not sure I’ve ever paid enough attention to how much you eat when you’re allowed to eat as much as you want to be able to say for sure. I’m basing my calculations on how much I eat, and assuming that you’ll eat about the same as me,” Ronan says. “Can you use a grill?”

“Charcoal or gas?” Adam asks, and then shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter, it’s yes to both, I was just wondering if we need to pick up charcoal.”

“It’s along the line of gas, anyway,” Ronan says, by which he means it’s a dream grill that doesn’t consume any fuel and yet still produces heat. “Next time we’ll get steaks, but this time at least, we can do burgers and bratwurst on the grill, if we want to.” He heaves bags of groceries into the trunk of the BMW, using Adam’s coveralls to pad the bag that the eggs are in.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had Bratwurst,” Adam says.

“It’s good, you’ll like it,” Ronan assures him.

“I’ve never been that picky of an eater,” Adam says. “Mostly if it stays still long enough, I’ll eat it.”

It’s almost three by the time they make it back out to the Barns and then they have to unload groceries. Ronan is starving because he’d forgotten all about breakfast, and then had spent the morning outside for the company of his raven, and Adam hadn’t taken a lunch to Boyd’s with him, so they make large sandwiches for themselves and fill their bellies while sitting at the kitchen table with Ronan’s hand drawn map sitting between them on the edge of the table.

“I’ve got two that are more or less between the Dell and the Glade,” Ronan says, after he’s eaten most of his sandwich and he can start to think again over the sound of his yammering belly. “Though the distance between the two is short enough that we could probably do it using only one. If I didn’t get anything in-between, I was prepared to make it just a very long path if necessary.”

“Better to use both if we can, under the theory that the more nodes included in our circle, the more power that circle can hold,” Adam says. “Though I think.” He stops talking, his brows drawn together in a fierce look of concentration. “I think we probably have enough gardens that are generating power that it might not matter that much. We’ve got at least two gardens that generate their own power without any outside interference from us, and we have three if you count the power we can produce using the table in the Dell.” He flushes, but faintly, as though he’s thinking about it too hard to be able to summon a lot of embarrassment. “I mean, I think that they _all_ generate power to a lesser or a greater degree just by being in existence. Places like the Copse and the Hollow don’t have any obvious ways of producing power, but both of them have grown enormously since we started doing this, and I think the power they produce is just in sheer healthy strength. But the well in the Stand produces power on it’s own, not by causing the Stand to grow, though it might do that, if we were to take down the wall protecting it at some point, but since that power isn’t being used to cause the Stand to grow, I think it either does now or eventually will, just travel around the rest of the circuit, touching the other gardens and making them stronger and healthier. So we may have enough nodes in our circle already, once that power starts moving through the circle, but I think that will take a little time to build up. Adding more nodes in at this point is possibly like a sooner rather than later deal. More nodes might net us the power to summon Cabeswater back sooner, depending on what those nodes produce in power, but even if we don’t add any more, I think that what we have now will eventually be enough, even if it has to build up to a certain level of power before it can hold enough in our circle.”

“Either way, we’re likely to have some wait time on our hands,” Ronan says, turning the map slightly with just the tips of his fingers. “We can’t expect us to finish the circle up one night and have Cabeswater back on the ley line the next morning.”

“Some, but I don’t think as much as you think, because of the Dreaming Ring. Once we close the circuit and move the Dreaming Ring to the ideal place within that circuit, the Ring itself will make all the land in between our gardens, all the empty spaces between our paths, hospitable to Cabeswater. It will be what is most likely to tip the slope enough for Cabeswater to slide back into the Cabeswater-shaped impression the forest left around this ley line.” Adam sighs. “Some waiting, but honestly, this is all going so much faster than I expected when we started doing it, Ronan. If we had to depend on the scrying done by me and the ladies at Fox Way, it would have taken much longer. It’s your ability to look in between places that already exist and find places that we can link them up to that is making it so fast. If you couldn’t dream in-between spaces, we’d still have, I think, five active nodes to investigate and attempt to seed, and even then, those nodes might not be useful in the actual circuit of power we’re trying to build. They might just be extraneous places that we expend resources to tend, but that don’t produce any energy for Cabeswater to use to move back into the place where it used to be.”

“When we met Blue and when I dreamt Chainsaw, I remember feeling like something was starting. I even had a conversation with Gansey about it, during which I was probably not very articulate. This morning I woke up with that feeling, except in reverse. I feel like something is ending. Like what we are building is almost built. Once we close up the rest of the circle, all that will be left to do is wait to see if what we want to happen does happen, and we have no way of knowing how long that wait is going to be. Do we keep finding and filling in nodes in-between while we wait for it, or do we just sit back and let the machine work?” Ronan asks, or maybe just muses, since he doesn’t really expect Adam to have any answers.

“I get the feeling it might be dangerous to break the circle once we set it in motion by moving the Dreaming Ring,” Adam says seriously. “I get the feeling that would be like standing on top of an almighty big wheel and expecting not to get run down. We could maybe still explore and cultivate nodes outside of the circle, but I don’t think we should even go to the gardens once we move the Dreaming Ring. After all, look at what we’re asking it to do. We want it to move an extraplanar piece of land back onto land that is, for all intents and purposes, already there. If it works the way it should work, Cabeswater will slide around the existing land, absorbing only the work we’ve done within the boundaries of the circle. Nothing will be lost. Land won’t suddenly go missing. It will simply flow back into the places where it fit before. But if some stupid Dreamer and his sidekick Magus is standing in that ground when it’s absorbed back into Cabeswater, I think I would give those two some fairly long odds against survival.”

Ronan’s back goes a little tense at the matter-of-fact way Adam had predicted their possible demise even as he feels pretty sure that Adam is most likely right. When Ronan had described it as a machine, he had been being hyperbolic, but in truth, it really _is_ a machine. A magic machine, and one designed to perform an enormous act of magic. Once the Dreaming Ring is moved and the circle is set into motion, the smartest thing for them to do is stay away from it while it’s trying to do its job, or risk getting chewed up in its cogs.

“Jesus Christ, we are a couple of seriously arrogant assholes,” Ronan says, and means it completely.

Adam gives him a long look, and then just nods. “We can’t even claim we didn’t know what we were doing, not really. We didn’t know the exact method that we were going to use to make this happen, but we knew that the thing that we were trying to make happen was vast in scope.”

“If there are people out there, just random hikers or some shit…?” Ronan half-asks.

“I don’t think they’ll even notice. The land both will and will not move, just like Cabeswater both is and is not. No, it’s just the two of us, that can feel the difference between a leftover patch of ancient mystical forest and a patch of plain old Henrietta scrubland, the two of us that are _connected_ to everything we built out there. Anyone else will move with the world. We would be standing still in a place where the world was trying to move around us, probably crushing us like bugs,” Adam says.

“Christ,” Ronan says, and slumps back in his chair. “Man, I know it’s a little late in the game to be asking this question, but regardless of whether or not we _can_ do this, _should we_ do this?”

“The fact that you’re asking, even this late in the game, probably means that you’re growing as a person,” Adam says wryly. “And the answer isn’t as simple as yes or no. There are arguments for and against restoring Cabeswater to its place on the ley line. I think we should do it, because Cabeswater was a part of me, a part that is missing now, in a way that I don’t know how to explain, but that is at least a little painful. I know that your power as the Greywaren is increased enormously if it’s connected to Cabeswater, and I’m not sure how important that is to you right now, but it might some day become very important. But also just because there should _be_ magic in the world. I believe that. But really, I think the question is pretty much academic at this point. Neither of us will be able to leave the gardens unconnected. We won’t be able to bear tending them, but watching them slowly dwindle as reality tears at the edges of the magic that holds them in the world, which is what would eventually happen. We’ve worked too hard to stop now. The best we can do is finish what we started, and let the magic work itself, however that happens.”

Ronan merely nods, because he doesn’t disagree with any of what Adam is saying, and because he knows he can’t stop now. It’s reckless and maybe should have never been started, but now that it’s almost done, it’s too late for him to stop. It would always drag at him, the potential of what they might have done, and he doesn’t have the disposition to deal with that in any decent way.

“It’s after four o’clock,” Ronan says. “We could get one node done this afternoon, probably, but not both. Or we could take tonight off, and finish the whole thing tomorrow. Connect the nodes, complete the circle, move the Dreaming Ring, and set the magic machine in motion.”

Adam cocks his head, his expression thoughtful. “I would like to take a shower and spend the whole evening in bed with you,” he says. “I would like to be able to spend the whole evening just finding out what makes you feel good.”

Ronan feels his mouth quirk into a half-smile. “It feels a little bit like taking one last night before we set our lives on fire,” he says. “But I could be convinced.”

“What would it take to convince you?” Adam asks, his mouth also a little quirked up, the Henrietta in his voice very thick.

“That you promise to make it a very fast shower,” Ronan says, his smirk blooming into a full smile. “Otherwise, I’m actually easy.”

“Nothing about you is easy,” Adam says, but it says it like that’s something he finds precious about Ronan, a quality that is wanted. “But I’ll make it as fast as I can while still getting all the grease off of me.”

“I’ll wait in your room,” Ronan says, and gets up, leaving their map with all its potential for future mayhem abandoned on the corner of the table. He walks through the living room and to the stairs, and just as he’s putting his foot up on the first riser, he hears Adam’s chair scraping back on the hardwood of the kitchen floor as he rises to follow.

The low heat that seems to stay at a low simmer anytime he’s around Adam begins to build up to something close to a boil, and he feels hyper-aware of his body, and of how it feels to strip down to nothing in Adam’s empty, waiting room, while he listens to the shower start up in the bathroom across the hall. He let’s himself splay on his back in the middle of Adam’s bed, claiming it as if it were territory, as he would claim Adam himself as territory if he could manage it somehow, and he’s already hard and ready, his skin seeming to prickle with the desire to be touched. In his imagination, he can see Adam’s body in the shower, water beading his on his skin, and he tries to imagine how this will go, what they will do, and finds that it doesn’t matter to him that much exactly what they do, as long as they are both enjoying it. He has the supplies necessary to do the complicated things that he grasps only in theory, but he doesn’t know if they will actually get that far, though the idea of it… the idea…

He has dreamed of doing things with Adam, but he has always known while they were happening that they were dreams. His dreams of Adam all hold subtle imperfections that Ronan can’t help but notice, the color of his eyes not quite right, the long, elegant hands not strong enough, the line of his jaw just slightly off. He’s always been careful with these dreams never to try to bring anything at all back with him. Knowing them for dreams had dampened some of his pleasure in them, but hadn’t stopped him from having them, they just came to him sometimes. He has never dreamed of Adam on purpose. It would be too close to some kind of nebulous wrong-doing to have used his powers as a Dreamer to have created Adam from nothing merely to have used his creation to satisfy his desire for Adam. But he hadn’t fought against the dreams that had come on their own, had taken them as gifts, imperfect as they were, and he had used them, sometimes, to help hold back his intense and ceaseless desire for Adam. He had let them come because they were a release of pressure, a way to allay his want, at least temporarily, some of that even because he had always been able to see the flaws in the dreams of Adam that had come to him. He had always wanted to remember those flaws, afterward, and remember that the real Adam wasn’t his, because it made it easier to keep his desire for the real Adam separate, walled off in his mind, so that it didn’t cause him to do anything stupid and reveal himself to the real Adam himself.

Until the night that he had kissed Adam, when that wall had crumbled, and even after, when nothing more had happened for so long, he had been unable to build that wall back up.

After the kiss, which was a kind of confession, building the wall again would have been a kind of lie, and Ronan doesn’t lie. Not even to himself, not even when it would make things easier.

But he’s glad now, that the wall isn’t there. He doesn’t have to try to tell Adam the truth because the truth had already been told, and he had only been waiting to find out if that truth was something that Adam wanted for himself. If Ronan was something that Adam wanted for himself. 

And somehow, Adam does. A thing hoped for and perhaps suspected just a little bit, but which had never been anything like a certainty, and now he is lying in Adam’s bed, where he’s been explicitly invited to be, and what they do together beyond just being together just doesn’t seem all that important. He wishes for more knowledge without actually wishing for more experience. It was right to be with Adam first. He will be happy if it’s never with anyone other than Adam.

He hopes to fuck Adam one day, hopes to have Adam fuck him, and if that happens today, Ronan is fine with it. But if it doesn’t happen today, he is also fine with it. The heat in his blood yearns for an outlet, but as long as that outlet is with Adam, it isn’t choosy. 

He hears the shower cut off, and sudden anticipatory sweat prickles at him in tender places, the back of his neck, the small of his back, the bends of his knees. He can’t tell why those places in particular seem to respond the way that they do, and can’t really focus his mind enough to try to work out the reason, even if he really cared. He can feel his heartbeat in his cock and also in his throat. His balls are already tight with need.

Adam pauses in the doorway to his room, a towel wrapped around his waist that isn’t hiding that he wants to be here, his hair two shades darker with water. He just looks at Ronan on his bed, closing his eyes for a moment, like seeing Ronan there is too much for him, and then he opens them and lets his eyes have their way with Ronan’s body, each glance looking like a promise. He unwinds the towel from around his waist and hangs it on a hook on the back of the door, and Ronan watches him walk toward the bed with his cock already heavy and hard, swaying slightly where it juts out from between his thighs with the movement of the rest of his body. He climbs up onto the bed on one knee, swinging the other across Ronan’s hips to straddle him. Ronan watches how the tendons in his forearms strain as he holds himself up and the way his biceps bunch at his own weight. Adam’s cock, in this position, hangs down low enough to brush against Ronan’s belly, and Ronan feels himself tense all over at the touch of it against his skin, light and barely there, and enough to make it feel like there are thorny vines twisted around the base of Ronan’s spine, and that they are slowly constricting. He hears his breath catch and hears Adam’s catch as well, and they are looking right into each other’s faces, but Ronan feels a little dazed and Adam’s eyes look dazed as they look down at him.

Ronan reaches up for Adam, winding his fingers into the back of his damp hair and pulling him down gently, so that they ease into a kiss, just the light brush of Adam’s lips descending down onto Ronan’s lips, and then Adam’s tongue darting out to lick at Ronan’s lower lip. Ronan pulls Adam down more firmly, and their mouths slot together into something firm and familiar, but no less devastating because of its familiarity. More devastating, somehow, that he should know the taste and feel of Adam’s mouth so completely, that they fall into the kiss with a kind of reciprocal grace, so that their lips and tongues and teeth move together with certainty, each of them understanding the things the other of them likes the feel of, and doing those things because they are good, and it’s good to make each other feel good.

Adam shifts his lower body so that he’s a little higher up on his knees, his cock no longer brushing against Ronan’s belly, a position that causes his back to bend into a curve to keep his mouth on Ronan’s, and then Adam’s hands come up to stroke across Ronan’s chest, his thumbs tracing Ronan’s collarbones, and then sliding down to press against Ronan’s nipples, which makes Ronan’s back arch up off the bed. Adam makes a low sound in his throat, as though gratified with that response, and then his hands slide down lower, tracing Ronan’s ribs with firm pressure, then one hand sliding to dip a fingertip into Ronan’s navel, and then to trace the dark line of hair that descends from it. That fingertip stops just short of where the hot length of Ronan lies jerking across his belly, and Ronan arches his hips up, sliding the head of his cock along that single fingertip. It’s hardly a caress at all, but is enough to wrack Ronan’s body with shudders, and Adam’s breathing goes ragged, so that he’s panting a little into the kiss.

“Don’t you want it to last more than five minutes for once?” Adam murmurs against his lips.

“No,” Ronan replies honestly. “If it lasts five minutes, then we’ll recover in half an hour and can do it again. I want you to touch me. I feel... hungry, Adam.” That last is part confession and part plea, and Adam breathes heavily against Ronan’s lips once, and then Adam wraps his long, strong fingers around Ronan’s cock and squeezes him gently. “Yes, come on,” Ronan demands, arching up into Adam’s hand, and Adam pulls back from his mouth, straightening up to look down at his hand wrapped around Ronan’s cock. He hitches out a low sound, and then closes his hand harder around Ronan and begins to stroke him. Ronan’s hips jerk and dance for a couple of seconds, and then match their motions to the rhythm of Adam’s hand on him, and Ronan breathes out several words of profanity at the feel of them moving together. 

It’s absolutely phenomenal, the feel of rocking up into Adam’s fist as he strokes downward around Ronan’s cock, and Ronan finds himself struggling to breathe around the hot bloom of pleasure at the root of his belly, which seems to only tighten the knot of exquisitely pleasurable brambles wrapped around the base of his spine. He watches, completely absorbed at the look of Adam’s long, elegant fingers working around his cock, until he loses the coordination to stay propped up on his elbows so that he can see, and then just lets himself collapse back onto Adam’s bed and arch helplessly up into Adam’s hand as the feel of it climbs up his spine like little jolts of pleasurable agony, and he hears himself gasping out Adam’s name and more profanity, and then it all coalesces into a bright, electric plume of heat between his thighs, and he trembles, shuddering, thighs flexing and bunching, Adam’s hand so tight around him that it’s almost a punishment, and then it snaps taut like a rubber band breaking, and his balls tighten and pulse and he comes so hard it’s like being struck down by something, so that he loses control over his limbs and his mind shatters into fragmentary moments of pleasure.

“God help me,” he hears himself slur, when he’s aware enough again to recognize that it’s his own voice, speaking, and even then it feels like he has to pry his eyes open before they’ll start working again. Adam is still straddling him, his gaze fixed on Ronan’s face, and Ronan feels a momentary and uncharacteristic self-consciousness at what he might have looked like because the way it had felt had been so enormous, had left him feeling stripped down to nerve endings, but it passes and he just looks back at Adam, who licks his lips, his eyes looking dark, pupils blown wide. Adam drops his gaze to the mess on his hand, considering it, and he raises his hand slowly toward his mouth.

“You don’t have to,” Ronan says hoarsely, because he doesn’t want Adam to think he has to do everything that Ronan has done.

But Adam’s voice is a little impatient when he says, “I know that,” and he licks at the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, his tongue quick and pink, and heat seizes Ronan’s belly at the way that Adam merely looks thoughtful and goes back for another taste, though he doesn’t clean his hand entirely the way that Ronan had. He slides off the side of the bed and grabs his bath towel from off the hook on the back of the door and wipes his hand, and then wipes Ronan’s chest and belly. He leaves the towel on the floor beside the bed and climbs gracefully back up onto the mattress, and Ronan feels limp and content in some respects, while still feeling that hunger in other ways. 

“Come up here, lie down with me,” he says, and Adam obligingly turns onto his side and slides himself close enough to Ronan that the entire front of his body touches the entire side of Ronan’s. Adam’s cock is hard and warm against Ronan’s hip, and Ronan would like to have it in his mouth again, but doesn’t want Adam to think that’s the only thing he wants to do now. Then he mentally shrugs, because if Adam doesn’t like it, surely he’ll let Ronan know, and scoots down the bed so that his face is on a level with Adam’s groin. He catches Adam’s cock in his fist and holds it at an angle that he thinks this will work at, and hears Adam gasp at Ronan’s hand on his cock, or maybe at the fact that Ronan obviously intends to suck him again, or maybe both. It doesn’t matter, just making Adam make that sound is enough, no matter what reason he made it for. Ronan leans in, and Adam smells more of bodywash this time than of that strong male scent that had been so present before, though that scent is there, too, just fainter, layered underneath the smell of clean skin. He licks the tip of Adam’s cock, and Adam’s hips rock forward slightly, and he makes another faint gasping sound. He tastes salty, not as metallic or as bitter as his come actually had. 

Ronan dips his neck and takes the head of Adam’s cock in his mouth, aware of the size of it stretching his lips and the odd sense of weight it seems to press against his tongue, even though the weight of his cock isn’t even resting on Ronan’s tongue at this angle. He slides down the length of the shaft a ways, his mouth watering a little and making things slick and a little messy, and he’s trying to remember to keep Adam from getting caught on his teeth, and Adam’s breathless gasps are distracting, they seem to travel straight from Ronan’s ears to his groin, and he concentrates his attention on getting as much of Adam to slide into and out of his mouth as he can, his rhythm a little choppy as he establishes for himself how much of Adam he can take. Then he wraps his fist around the base of Adam’s cock and experiments, using lots of tongue, and then using lots of suction instead, and Adam’s hips seem to be a pretty reliable way to gauge if he likes something, and if so, how much he likes it, as they rock forward against the hand Ronan is holding the base of his cock almost ceaselessly from the moment Ronan starts, sometimes stuttering forward hard, sometimes just rocking forward in time with Ronan’s mouth on his cock. Ronan loses track of how long he’s been using his tongue and lips around Adam’s cock, half of his attention focused on the sounds Adam is making and the way his hips are reacting to what he’s doing. He only knows he isn’t really ready to stop when Adam’s hand strokes across the back of his head. “Ronan,” Adam whispers, his voice cracked and tight. “I… You have to stop, I’m going to…” but this time Ronan doesn’t stop, and when Adam apparently realizes that Ronan doesn’t intend to stop, his hips jerk forward twice hard, thrusting Adam’s cock through Ronan’s fist and into his mouth, and then Adam’s cock jerks in his mouth, the head seeming to be trying to hit the roof of Ronan’s mouth, and then Adam is moaning, low and long, and Ronan is surprised at how much Adam seems to come, his mouth fills with that metallic, bitter taste, and Ronan manages to swallow once, and then it fills again, and Ronan isn’t quite fast enough, and it drips out of his mouth to slide down Adam’s shaft and make a mess of Ronan’s hand. 

Adam is still moaning out a low, helpless sound, like he’s dying, so Ronan doesn’t pull off, but Adam seems to be done coming, Ronan is just sucking him through the aftershocks now, and he keeps his mouth careful, because his own cock is usually pretty sensitive right after he comes, and he doesn’t want to stop until Adam pulls away, but he doesn’t want to cause Adam discomfort either. Then Adam goes limp all over, his hips stilling, and he begins to shrink down a little in Ronan’s mouth, so Ronan gently disengages and leans up to look at Adam, who has his eyes closed, and is breathing in long, desperate gulps, but when he opens his eyes, they are dazed and glassy and blissed out, and Ronan is pleased at that look, and grins a little, his lips feeling a little sore or chapped or something. He leans over Adam to retrieve the towel and clean up his hand, where Adam’s come had slipped out of his mouth, and to make sure he doesn’t need to clean Adam up anywhere else, but it seems like whatever he didn’t swallow only got on his own hand.

Adam reaches out and clumsily strokes along Ronan’s buzzed hair, and he murmurs, “Come up here, come back up,” and Ronan moves to lie on his side facing Adam, nudging at Adam’s legs with one knee until Adam lifts his upper leg and lets Ronan slide his thigh between Adam’s so he can lie close, their heads on the same pillow. Adam’s eyes are still all pupil, and his voice sounds a little drugged, but still serious, when he says, “I’d like to try doing that, but I’ll be upset if you come in my mouth, Ronan. Maybe that’s not fair, but I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet.”

“I wasn’t quite ready, some of it got away from me,” Ronan says, extremely not worried about whether or not he gets to come in Adam’s mouth at this point. “It came faster than I expected. And you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. But you can ask me about anything you do want to do, and we’ll figure out how to make it work.”

For some reason, this makes Adam flush deeply red, but he doesn’t actually ask Ronan for anything, just looks at him, like looking at Ronan is all he wants to do right now, and Ronan sort of understands it, because he feels like he could look at Adam’s face, flushed and dazed with afterglow, for hours.

“Why did you choose me?” Adam asks, and tucks his hand under his cheek, as if he feels the need for the touch of his own skin against his face to be able to listen to the answer to that question.

Ronan ponders how to answer it. “I didn’t exactly choose you,” he says finally. “I only knew you, and the more I knew you, the more I wanted to know, and that has never stopped being true. It isn’t a thing I know how to explain. It’s just a thing that happened to me, like I woke up with you tattooed onto my skin one day, on the inside of my skin, or maybe underneath my skin. I can’t tell you when it even happened exactly. Only that it started with just wanting to touch you, and grew into wanting you to want to touch me. I noticed when you worked too much and looked too tired, I wanted to give you a place to lie down and rest. Or. I wanted to _be_ the place where you came to lie down and rest. I don’t know how to explain it better than that.”

“Did you already know, when you… the fight with my father?” Adam asks.

“I was just starting to know, then,” Ronan answers honestly, though he is by no means sure that honesty will help him here. “When I saw you fall, it felt like _I_ was falling. And I needed to be sure that you could get back up again more than I needed anything else.”

“So the whole time I was with Blue,” Adam says, and closes his eyes. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry if it hurt you.”

“I wasn’t jealous, though. Not really. I didn’t think I could have you, and it only made sense that you would want her. I was just… resigned about Blue. I didn’t start thinking of ways of trying to get you to look at me until after you and Blue were done. And I tried not to want you too much, but that never seemed to work out very well for me. I didn’t know how to make you look at me, so I just… let you see that I was looking at you, I guess. In small ways. So that you didn’t have to feel like you had to do something about the way I felt, but so that you didn’t feel blindsided by it when I decided to tell you. I always knew I would tell you some time. I just didn’t know when, or if it would upset you. I tried to be ready for you not to want to be with me.”

“And when you kissed me?” Adam asks, his brows drawn faintly together as though he’s uncertain of what he’s asking himself.

“It felt like if I waited for things to stop happening, I’d never tell you. So when there was a moment of quiet and we were alone together, I kissed you, so you’d know. I knew you knew at least a little, but I still had to tell you. Just in case you didn’t understand how I felt. If I had let you leave for college without trying to tell you, it would have been like lying to you. Or it would have been like I was trying to hide it from you. And I didn’t want you to think how I felt about you was something I felt like I had to hide from you. I didn’t know if you felt the same, but I thought you might, or might be starting to, and I felt like I had to let you know that the option was there, if you wanted it.” Ronan takes a shaky breath. “I wish you hadn’t kissed me back and then pretended nothing had happened for weeks after, but I could kind of understand why you would.”

“Why would I?” Adam asks, as though he really wants to know the answer.

“To take some time to work out whether or not you felt the same. I had a lot longer to work out how I felt. And then to decide whether you wanted to try to put up with being with me, even if you did feel the same about me. I know how hard I can be to be with,” Ronan confesses.

Adam tugs his hand out from under his cheek and slides the palm of the same hand across Ronan’s buzzed hair. “I’m not really finding it all that hard,” Adam says, mouth curved gently. “Will you come visit me when I’m at Stanford, Ronan? I know you wouldn’t want to stay there with me, I know how you feel about the Barns. But will you come sometimes?”

“Yes,” Ronan says. “I’ll come as often as you want me to. And you can come here, for breaks and things. I would like it if you did. I know how you feel about Henrietta, but we’re far enough away from Henrietta out here, and you wouldn’t have to go into town that often. Or at all, if you didn’t want to. And Cabeswater. If.” Ronan decided to let that ‘if’ stand on its own. It’s still a big ‘if.’

“Of course I’ll come,” Adam says, and strokes his palm along Ronan’s buzzed hair again. “No matter what happens with Cabeswater. It’s important to me, but not as important as you are.”

Something clenches tightly in Ronan’s chest. He smiles helplessly, probably foolishly. He can’t help it. It’s nice to hear it out loud. It’s the first time Adam has said it out loud, and while Ronan had already believed it, it’s still nice to hear Adam say it, like the two of them are as permanent in his mind as they are in Ronan’s. Ronan doesn’t like to think of himself as needy in that way, but he can’t deny the warmth the affirmation kindles behind his breastbone.

They do stay in bed all evening, touching and kissing and tasting each other’s skin, and when Adam finally puts his mouth on Ronan’s cock, Ronan has to stop him almost right away, after maybe two minutes at most, and that is with Ronan concentrating all his attention on resisting, but he had been completely unprepared for the soft, wet, heat of it, and even then it only takes a half a dozen long, strokes of Adam’s long, strong fingers to push him over the edge from there. He’s suddenly more impressed with Adam’s stamina, both times Ronan had done it to him, but especially the last time, when Ronan is sure he’d taken longer by far than Ronan had before Adam had had to stop him.

“It gets a little easier,” Adam says, pressed up against Ronan’s back with one arm slung around his waist, a hand wrapped around his cock, stroking slow and light, until Ronan feels like he’s floating somewhere right up above his skin.

“What does?” Ronan pants, desperately trying to twist his hips harder into Adam’s deliberately loose hand wrapped around him.

“The part where you think you’re going to come the second my mouth is on you and around you. At least, it was a little easier for me, the second time,” Adam says.

“Why are you torturing me?” Ronan demands, Adam’s hand still light and quick on his cock, good, so good, but not enough.

“Just to see how much it will take this way. Just to be touching you for as long as I want to while you’re still hard in my hand.” Adam’s voice is low and Ronan can feel Adam’s hard on pressing against his lower back, but that is apparently not going to stop Adam from keeping his hand wrapped only loosely around Ronan’s cock while he strokes him.

“Adam,” Ronan breathes out helplessly, his hips still trying to jerk into Adam’s hand with more pressure. He feels like he’s about half a minute from starting to thrash with the infuriatingly not-quite-there pleasure of it.

“You’re such a baby,” Adam laughs softly, but his fist tightens around Ronan’s cock, and Ronan comes almost at once, the orgasm feeling almost like a blow to the midsection, so that he curls up around the hot flood of it when it finally happens, groaning in relief. When he curls up, the length of Adam’s cock slips down to stroke across the crack of his ass, the head pressed briefly and gently against Ronan’s hole, which only makes the whole thing better, before Adam pulls carefully back, clearly not having meant to do it at all, and not sure how Ronan will respond to it.

Once he’s through shuddering through his orgasm, Ronan rolls onto his belly and says, “I’ll let you, if you want to.” He’s still panting, but Adam seems to understand what he means anyway.

He just says, “I’m not sure either of us is ready for that,” but he sounds more or less contented when he says it. “We’ll get there. There’s no rush.”

“I know,” Ronan says. “But you should know. I’m ready to try it whenever you are. I’ve got… supplies.”

Ronan hears the curl in Adam’s mouth when he says, “Good to know. Are these real supplies or dream supplies?”

“Uh,” Ronan says, and feels himself flush even though Adam can’t see his face. “Some of both.”

“And have you used any of them?” Adam asks, his tone low and a little hot.

“A little bit. To experiment with,” Ronan admits. Adam rolls over onto his back, letting his come slick hand just rest on his belly for a moment.

“Inside or out?” he asks.

“Both,” Ronan says, still flushing, still not turning over to face Adam.

“Which worked better?” Adam says, almost academically now.

“The dream stuff mostly,” Ronan admits. “When I bring it out of the dream, I know exactly what I want it to do. I don’t think you can get that at any store.”

Adam lets out a low rumble of a chuckle. “No, I don’t guess you can. I’ll get us something to clean up with.”

Roan feels the bed dip down and Adam slides off the side, and does his best to get his blushing impulses under control by the time he gets back.

They are both still at least half hard after they’re finished cleaning up, which Ronan knows they could be mostly hard again in another fifteen or twenty minutes, but when Adam climbs back into bed with him, he rolls straight into Ronan’s arms, facing him, their brows touching and their legs tangling, but most of the rest of their bodies not touching.

“I’m leaving my phone set to go off early,” he tells Ronan. “If we want to get the whole thing put in motion tomorrow, we’ll need the time.” Then he ruins his serious, dedicated tone by nuzzling up against the lower hinge of Ronan’s jaw.

“You didn’t ask me,” Adam says, after they’ve been quiet long enough that Ronan thinks Adam might have fallen asleep.

“Ask you what?” Ronan asks.

“Why I picked you,” Adam says.

“I’m fucking irresistible,” Ronan says, and brushes his lips against Adam’s temple. “No wait, that should have been fucking irredeemable. I always get those two mixed up.” A few seconds go by in silence, and then Ronan can’t help himself. “Why _did_ you pick me?”

“It was when you took me with you to the Barns to show me how you were trying to get your father’s dream creatures to wake up. I knew it was because of your mom, and then you told me about Matthew, but it was more than that. I just kept thinking: Ronan is someone who will never give up on you, no matter how hard it gets. That wasn’t all of it or anything, but that was the start of it for me. I had noticed you looking at me, but I tried not to think that it meant anything, because why would someone like you want someone like me? But when you wanted to share what you had been doing about waking up your father’s dream creatures, I was the one you chose to bring with you. And I felt special. And I was sure that no matter how hard it got, you would never give up on me, either. And I’d never had that before. Nothing even close to it.”

“Did you… were you bisexual?” Ronan asks, and isn’t entirely sure he wants to know.

“I didn’t think I was until I started thinking of you that way,” Adam admits. “Afterward, I was always a little amazed that if I was going to have a crush on a boy, it wasn’t Gansey. But I never felt like that toward him. He was like my brother. I’ve noticed good looking guys since then, so I’m pretty sure I actually am bisexual, but as far as this goes, as far as you and me… I might as well be gay.” Adam turns to look him in the face, his brows drawn faintly together seriously. 

“It didn’t hurt, I think, that after the whole thing with Kavinsky, you changed. You were more likely to laugh and less likely to lash out. You were still you, prickly and difficult and arrogant and smug, but you were better. Charging the ley line for you that day is still one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. If I never do anything as important again, I still know that I did that, that you needed me and I gave you what you needed. I heard all the gory details later, of course, from Gansey and Blue, but I already knew what we were doing that day. I already knew that I was working to repair the ley line so that you could use it to fight whatever Kavinsky brought out of his nightmares and into the real world. Persephone and I barely said more to each other all day than ‘Hurry,’ until Kavinsky pulled everything from the ley line and I couldn’t feel anything from Cabeswater at all to tell me what to do next. And she told me, and this maybe is one of the most important things anyone has ever told me in my life, that the Magician isn’t someone who can only solve problems when he has something to work with. That the Magician _finds_ the solutions to problems when there doesn’t seem to be anything else to work with. It’s why, after it was all over, I still went to Fox Way to study with Calla and Maura, why I take the time to talk to Artemus and Gwenllian. My power is not just based in what Cabeswater let me do. It helped. God knows, it helped. But I am still the Magician, even without Cabeswater.”

He turns further and tucks his face into Ronan’s neck. “I miss Persephone so much,” he says, and Ronan hears the little catch in his breath that makes Ronan wild to do something to comfort him in his grief. “She was the most like me, she understood me. And I can never pay her back for all she did for me.”

“You can pay her back,” Ronan says, sliding his hand up and down Adam’s spine soothingly. “You can be like Persephone. You can carry her memory with you and help judge the best course of action by considering what Persephone would have thought about it. You can be Calla and Maura’s friend, and without her, they need friends right now. You can’t step into her place and fill up that vacancy, but you can give as much as you can to help them through it, and they’ll help you, too, help you remember her and all she did for you. I don’t think Persephone was the kind of person that would have felt like you had to pay her back in monthly installments or anything. I didn’t know her like you knew her, but I think she’d want you to pay her back by doing the right things when the chips were down.”

Adam gives a watery laugh. “Someday I’m going to tell someone that you can be wise about people’s feelings and how to offer comfort, and they’re never going to believe me.”

“It’s different, between other people and you. I don’t care about other people, except for Blue and Gansey and I guess Cheng, and a few others. I care about you. I want to be… the best version of myself for you. I know that won’t always be all that great, but I want to do the best I can for you.”

“What you just said was very great,” Adam says, face still pressed into Ronan’s neck. “About Persephone, about how to pay her back. And about wanting to be the best version of yourself for me. I feel like that, too. Like I want to be able to give you the pieces of myself I never let anyone else see and let you hold them for me, so that I know that they’re safe.”

They are both silent for several long seconds. “Christ, Parrish, quick, check and make sure you still have all your junk. We just had a conversation I think only women are allowed to have with one another.”

Adam punches him weakly on the arm. “I’m going to tell Blue you said that,” he says, but he is laughing, still a little watery, but real laughter.

“I’m going to make a sandwich,” Ronan says. “If I don’t eat again before we go to sleep, I’m going to wake up in the middle of the night hungry. You want?”

“Yeah, that salami that you hate,” Adam says. “And I’ll take a beer if you’ve got one.”

Ronon smirks wickedly. “I keep them in the mini-fridge in my room so Declan doesn’t bitch about my underage drinking. You get the beer, I’ll make the sandwiches.”

“Deal,” Adam says, and they both slide off the bed at the same time. “We might as well eat in bed,” Adam says. “These sheets have to be changed before I can sleep in them, so crumbs won’t make a difference.”

“Sleep in my bed tonight,” Ronan says. “We can change these out and clean house and do laundry after I get back from Mass on Sunday. We’ll have some waiting to do, so we might as well plan on it being a cleaning day.” He hesitates. “Would you… I know you’re not religious, and you won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t want to, but you are welcome to come to Mass with Matthew, Declan, Opal, and I on Sunday.”

“They still make that drive?” Adam asks. “I guess I figured with Matthew in Washington, they just would have found something closer.”

“They might, sooner or later. But right now, Matthew especially isn’t quite willing to give up on Saint Agnes,” Ronan says. “It’s where we came when we were a whole family. And Declan is willing to make the drive.”

“Which is decent of him,” Adam says carefully.

“Declan and I are as okay as we’re probably ever going to be, but even that much is a lot better than what it was,” Ronon says. “He hasn’t exactly mellowed out, but he’s pretty much come to terms with who and what I am. I may always mean less to him than Matthew or even Opal, whom, against all odds, he seems to adore, but part of that is on me. I didn’t deal well. Declan didn’t deal well. And together we dealt like it was a nuclear holocaust. We can talk a little, and that’s more than we could do before.” Ronan rolls one shoulder in a shrug. “So yeah, if you want to come, you should.”

“I’d like to come, I think,” Adam says. “Do you want to tell your brothers about you and me?”

“Yeah,” Ronan says. “I don’t lie, and I won’t keep you like a dirty little secret. Besides, Matthew and Opal already love you, and Declan, I’m pretty sure, has known that I’m gay since I hit puberty. Just. Prepare to be adopted. I’m not kidding. My family has always liked you almost as much as they liked me -- with Declan, sometimes he’s liked you a lot more -- and they’re going to want to include you in family shit that I can only sometimes get out of. They aren’t likely to take no for an answer. I’m pretty sure Declan is planning on either Thanksgiving or Christmas here, and they’ll want you to be with us. I know you don’t come from a big family, but Blue and Gansey and Cheng will be here on whichever one they pick, and it will probably involve all the inhabitants of Fox Way, too. Just. Expect a bigger Holiday than you’re used to.”

Adam’s eyes have gone soft. “I never thanked you for what you did that night. With my dad.”

“I did it at least as much for me as I did it for you,” Ronan says. “I had to be sure someone would be there to catch you. And, hey, you did thank me. You pressed charges. Otherwise I’d have a rap sheet for assault and would have been kicked out of school. Not that I cared about school right then, but it still would have sucked. And you got away from him. That’s the thanks I really wanted. Even if you did move into a shithole.”

“You couldn’t have hated it that much, as often as you slept on the floor of it,” Adam says.

“No, I really did hate it that much. I just liked you more than I hated it. I’m not sure how many beers I’ve got in the mini-fridge. Should be at least two. I haven’t been going through them as much.”

Adam opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else, and then closes it and walks down the hall to Ronan’s bedroom. Ronan trots down the stairs to the kitchen and makes a couple of moderately sized sandwiches, one with _salami_ , which he washes his hands after handling. Adam has both beers open and on the nightstand when Ronan makes it back to Adam’s room. He’s sitting cross legged on the bed, his foot only an inch or two from a suspiciously damp spot. He takes the sandwich Ronan passes him, and then passes him a beer in exchange.

“I don’t really drink,” Adam says. “I never really have. It was always my dad’s thing. But there’s something about a salami sandwich that doesn’t taste right without beer to wash it down.”

“To wash the flavor off your tongue, you mean,” Ronan sneers, and settles down on the bed cross legged without even looking for wet spots -- he unsurprisingly lands in one under his left thigh -- and balances his plate on his knee to eat his sandwich and drink his beer. Adam eats fastidiously, even though they’re going to wash these sheets before they ever sleep in them again, and Ronan is a little fascinated at watching him eat, a little because he worries about him eating enough, and a little because he can’t imagine Adam learning such neat table manners in the house he’d grown up in.

It doesn’t take either of them long to clean their plates and tip back the remainder of their beers. Adam grabs his cell phone, apparently to check that the alarm is still set early enough to suit him, and says, “It’s barely nine. I still feel like I could fall asleep right now and sleep until sometime next week.”

“Too bad. You have to wake up at ass o’clock and help me finish connecting the circle and getting the Dreaming Ring into place. After we get that done, you can start sleeping in as late as you want every day except Sundays,” Ronan snipes.

“Two more nodes, assuming they’re both usable, and then moving the Dreaming Ring,” Adam says thoughtfully. “We’ll want to walk the gardens one more time.”

“I knew you were going to want to,” Ronan grumbles. “This is going to be an eleven or twelve mile round trip, not counting whatever we do with the Dreaming Ring. Do we know how to start it and get out of its way before it starts to do its thing?”

“I’ll double check, but I don’t think it’s going to start happening instantly. We should have time to get away from the gardens before anything really starts happening.” Adam sounds pretty sure, but Ronan still has the mental image of the rest of the world starting to shift around them while they stand still, getting squashed like bugs.

“Make sure you double check. Not getting out of it in time would be a stupid way to die,” Ronan sneers.

Adam rolls his eyes. “Give me your plate and your bottle,” he says. “I’ll take them to the kitchen. I don’t know about you, but I’m still sticky in a few places. Is your shower big enough for two?”

“Actually, no, it’s just a half-bath,” Ronan says. “But the guest shower will take two.”

“I’ll meet you there,” Adam says, and scrambles off the bed with his armload of plates and bottles.

Ronan starts the shower in the guest bathroom, notices that the niches in the wall contain Adam’s cheap shampoo and bodywash, and ducks into Declan’s room to steal his expensive stuff. By the time Adam makes it into the bath, Ronan has thrown his Suave in the trash.

Adam doesn’t even notice until he actually reaches for the body wash and realizes that it isn’t his. “You don’t have to use the cheapest shit you can buy anymore, Parrish,” Ronan says, knowing he sounds a little snappish, and unable to help it.

Adam, however, just says, “I was just going to finish what I had, and then go out shopping to find something I might actually like myself.” He opens the bodywash and sniffs it. “This isn’t what you use.”

“Stole it from Declan,” Ronan says. “Might as well use his expensive stuff. He doesn’t come here often enough to remember if he has any left over in his shower, so every time he comes, buys a new bottle. He must have four bottles of shampoo and bodywash under his sink.” Ronan holds out a hand, and Adam deposits a dollop of bodyway directly into his palm, brows arched faintly in question. “We’ve been using the washcloths for other things,” Ronan explains. “We’ll have to get more from the linen closet later, and make do with our hands tonight.” He scrubs his palms together until he gets suds and then goes about washing anyplace that might still be sticky.

Adam in the shower with the water beading on his skin looks just as good as he’d looked in Ronan’s imagination, and Ronan does his best not to look, but his self control has always been kind of crap, so he’s hard by the time Adam has washed all his potentially sticky places, and they swap ends of the shower so they can rinse off. Adam smirks at Ronan’s hard on knowingly -- not that he has much room to smirk, as he’s most of the way hard himself -- and they dry off with the last clean towels in the guest bathroom, and Ronan reminds himself to restock it with towels and washcloths first thing tomorrow.

They make their way naked into Ronan’s bedroom, which is something that Ronan’s mom had always referred to as ‘boy tidy,’ which means that there isn’t anything Ronan would be embarrassed to have his mother see sitting out anywhere. He needs to do laundry, but other than a few books and some oddities from dreams sitting around, it’s not that bad. Adam looks around curiously, but doesn’t ask questions. He merely puts his phone on Ronan’s bedside table, and asks, “Which one of us has to sleep against the wall?”

“I’ll do it,” Ronan says. “You still don’t know your way around the place yet in the dark. If I sleep by the wall and you have to get up in the middle of the night, there’s less of a chance that you’ll crush my spleen.”

Ronan’s sheets are dark blue and match his plain dark blue comforter. He slides into bed, pauses to make sure Adam can get the light off and then use the bathroom light down the hall to navigate the piles of clothes to get to the bed, and then settles down. Adam rolls around for a few seconds, wads his pillow up into a ball and shoves it under his neck, and, after a few seconds, says, “Your bed is harder.”

“We can go change your sheets if you want,” Ronan says, faintly grumpy.

“That was not a complaint. I slept on a futon mattress on the floor, I’m more comfortable on a harder bed,” Adam says.

“You should have said,” Ronan says. “I know this place isn’t a Gansey-style mansion, but I would have swapped bedrooms with you if you needed a harder bed to sleep in.”

“Honestly, we’ve been so tired at the end of every day that it hasn’t mattered much. I think I’m just noticing it now because we didn’t actually spend all day walking between the gardens and new nodes.” Adam turns over onto his side, and Ronan slides up to press his front to Adam’s back, slinging an arm around Adam’s waist. Declan’s body wash smells good mixed with Adam’s natural scent, so that he doesn’t really smell like Declan at all, which is a good thing, Ronan decides, as that would have bugged him. He just smells like Adam with better body wash. He can feel his still mostly hard cock pressed up against Adam’s ass, which would be a lot more distracting if they hadn’t spent the whole evening in bed, but is still a little distracting in spite of that. It’s the first night they’ve both spent without underwear, and Adam’s skin is warm and smooth.

In spite of the distraction, Ronan drops off to sleep relatively quickly, and dreams of the gardens, as he has every night since they had started building them.

\--

Adam’s phone alarm sounds like a hyperactive cricket. If Ronan could reach over Adam and get his hands on it, he would make it shut up, but he’s saved from having to figure out how to do so by Adam picking the phone up and clicking through screens until it stops going off. “Remind me to find you a better alarm clock tone than that one,” Ronan mutters, his voice half muffled against Adam’s bare back.

“I like that one,” Adam yawns. “All the other ones are very jarring.”

“They’re supposed to be jarring. It’s their job to wake you up,” Ronan argues.

“That one wakes me up,” Adam says, smiling a little. “Time to get up, Ronan. No lounging in bed today. I think we’d better have a good breakfast and think about packing a lunch for the day.”

Ronan considers burying his head under his pillow, but reluctantly decides that Adam would probably just steal the pillow. “Alright, I’m up. Let me get in the shower and wake up the rest of the way.”

“I’ll start breakfast,” Adam says, and rolls out of bed. He seems awfully bright eyed about the events of the day, while Ronan is still worried about them making it out of the Dreaming Ring alive. He drags himself into the shower and washes with his own body wash and gradually starts to feel a little better. When he gets downstairs, Adam is serving pancakes in a pair of sweats so ragged that they almost have to be the most comfortable clothes he owns. Ronan gets coffee and sits down in front of his plate of pancakes, absently smearing them with butter and drowning them with syrup. Adam watches him do this with amusement mixed with fondness. He’s already halfway through his plate of pancakes, though he’s chosen to go with orange juice rather than coffee.

The map is still sitting on the corner of the table, and Ronan studies it while he makes his way through his pancakes. He hasn’t even made it a quarter of the way through his breakfast when Adam says he’s going to take a shower, and Ronan remembers there are no washcloths or clean towels in the guest bathroom. He makes it up the stairs ahead of Adam and digs around in the linen closet until he finds a fresh stack of both, and makes it into the bathroom in time to hand Adam a washcloth and hang a towel over the bar for him. Then he staggers back downstairs to his breakfast and finishes eating -- the pancakes are good, fluffy and filling -- rinses his plate and stacks it on top of Adam’s, and then goes to find a pair of black jeans and a black tank top.

Adam comes out of the guest bathroom in a towel, and Ronan pauses to kiss him as he’s on his way into the guest bedroom for clothes.

Ronan could probably make room in his closet and drawers for Adam’s clothes. It’s not like he has many. If they’re going to sleep together and not try to hide it, it seems silly for Adam’s clothes to live in the guest bedroom.

Ronan picks up the map again, and measures approximate distances with his own mental map, and is pretty sure that if both nodes don’t end up being usable, they can fill the gap in the circle with just one of them. It would make for at least one long path, but not much longer than some of the others.

Adam comes down in ratty jeans and a plain white t-shirt thin enough from many washing that Ronan can make out the shapes of his nipples beneath the fabric. He crushes the urge to take Adam straight back to bed, and says, “So do you just want to park as close to the Glade as we can get and walk the path all the way around until we get to the two new nodes?”

“There’s no telling exactly where the Dreaming Ring is going to end up in the circle, so I don’t really see that it matters one way or the other. If your map is close to right, we might not have to move it much at all. Maybe a little to the southwest. The Ring will know where it needs to be to work the best to do what we want it to do.” Adam scoops up the Cabeswater repair kit, checks to be sure they still have plenty of gardening pebbles, and Ronan shoulders the shovel. 

The drive to the Glade is not a long one, since it’s nestled in a pocket of plain Henrietta forest, which means they need to make most of the trek on foot anyway. They step inside by going around the faerie ring, and pause there, greeting the trees and checking to make sure the Cave of Ravens is still bound. It is, and the Glade had grown a bit, though still not as much as some of the other gardens. Adam shuffles his cards and pulls out one. 

The Sun.

There are no prickly bushes to be seen within it or around any of the Glade’s entrances or exits, so they take the vine trellis path to the base of the stairs that lead up to Copse. The hillside on both sides of the stairs is covered in ivy and daylilies, more, Ronan thinks, than last time, and the Copse itself consists of oaks that range from mature to towering. The blackberries are spreading a little to either side, but there’s no more room up here to clear out prickly bushes to let them continue to grow. The ferns and daylilies stretch out behind the blackberries almost as far as they can see, which means the ferns have devoured several more hundreds of feet of the prickly bushes.

Adam shuffles and pulls a card.

The Sun.

They take the sprite-carved looking path, carpeted with new grass that swallows up their footprints all the way to the Clearing. The trees are still pushing the prickly bushes back, though if you go far enough into the oaks, maples, and elms, you can see them gathered behind the clearing. The blood red poppies still bloom within the first ring of oaks, where they had spilled their blood on the soil. The dreaming tree looks no different, but the stream has built up into a small pond, trickling over the edge of the Clearing in a fast stream full of red bellied fish. 

Adam shuffles and draws a card. 

The Sun.

They step out of the clearing at the southeastern edge and are on the ledge the leads down to the Grove. Surrounded by the grotto, it has no room to grow, but Ronan feels the faint pulse of what he assumes has to be the wellspring putting out power as soon as he gets his feet on the ground. He remembers the Grove telling them that the wellsprings were the hearts of Cabeswater, and the power he can feel emanating from this one, while not as strong as Cabeswater’s magic as a whole, feels more _like_ Cabeswater’s magic than most of their other gardens do.

Adam shuffles and takes a card.

The Sun.

The Hollow is so close to the edge of the grotto that the Grove lies in now that they have almost grown together. Barely five hundred feet separate them. The beeches have pushed the prickly bushes all the way back to the shale wall that Adam had chiseled the design into to open the ley line, and the trees are still spreading. The pond doesn’t look much bigger, but the waterfall is almost a torrent. Ronan would have feared for the spruces that had sprung up on either side of the stream down below the falls, but those spruces are massive now, their branches hung with moss and lichen speckling their bark. The footpath could easily park two cars side by side, and there are no prickly bushes visible anywhere.

Adam shuffles and pulls out a card.

The Sun.

They follow the rock-lined path, seeing a few prickly bushes lurking outside the boundaries of the path, but none close by, and the Stand, enclosed as it is by its eight foot wall, hasn’t grown any bigger, but like in the Grove, as soon as Ronan steps foot on the hummock it stands on, he can feel the pulse of power running up his legs through the soles of his feet. He can smell the sweet taste of the water of the well in the air, and he can feel the power of that water running backward, toward the Hollow, and forward, into the Dell as if it were air blowing gently across his skin.

Adam shuffles and draws a card.

The Sun.

The path between the Stand and the Dell starts out a little higher than the other rock walls they’d built, just to increase the strength of the borders around it, but eventually they are walking between the normal low rock walls of the path. They crawl under the granite outcropping to reach the dip in the land that the Dell thrives in, and though it isn’t enclosed, the table must be doing it’s job, because there is not a prickly bush to be seen.

Adam shuffles and plucks out a card.

The Sun.

“The next node is about half a mile due west of here,” Ronan says, and brings to mind the crater in the earth that had marked in on his mental map. “There’s a big crater slightly to the north of it. I think if we circle south around the crater, we’ll step right into the node. 

For a while the path is clear, but when they get close to the crater, perhaps two hundred feet away, the earth is littered with the prickly bushes. Ronan grimly unlimbers his shovel and begins to dig them a path through the, tossing them out to either side for now, since they don’t know yet if there is anything they can use them to build with, in the next node. They circle around the crater to the south -- the crater itself is empty of the prickly bushes -- and step into water up to their ankles. They exchange a look, and glance behind them at the delineation of prickly bushes to water. The water stretches in every direction about five hundred feet, and in the middle of it is a single island, neither wide nor long, maybe thirty feet on each side, but rounded. In the center of the island is a low, perfectly round line of what look like bayberry bushes, and in the middle of the bushes is a crater, which still looks to be smoldering, with a light colored chunk of metal embedded in the middle of it.

“What is it?” Ronan asks, taking another step toward it, but even as he lifts his foot to take another step it stops, mid-step, and he is forced back.

Adam is dealing out cards into his free hand, since they are surrounded by water, and he can’t lay them out on the ground as he usually would.

The Devil. The World. Strength.

“Bondage, metaphorical usually, but in this case, maybe literal. The World, a heavy weight nearing its completion, and Strength, the ability to do good, and do good to the world around you. I think the Bondage is the water, Ronan. I think this is a seed.”

“It looks like a meteorite or something,” Ronon objects, and his foot, held up mid-step, finally finishes its downward motion.

“No, it’s a natural thing, or it couldn’t get it’s power through The World.” Adam opens up the Cabeswater repair kit and takes out a pair of heavy leather gloves. When he walks toward the thing, whatever is stopping or slowing Ronan doesn’t seem to affect him at all. He leans over it, his hands dangling in between his splayed knees, and takes the spade and slowly begins to pry it up out of the crater it had made in the ground. The hole it had made, Ronan sees, is littered with smaller metallic specks. Adam scoops these carefully away, tossing the spade filled dirt with them in it out into the water. The he begins to dig the hole deeper. “I need the shovel here, Ronan, we need it as deep as it can get.”

Ronan tries to take another step, and find that this time, he can do so easily, with no resistance holding him, back. He moves to where Adam is cradling the seed to his chest and flicking out spade fulls of the earth around it, and begins to go to work on the hole for real, pulling more of the silvery stuff the seed -- seed? -- seems to be made of out of the earth and flinging it out into the water.

“Hold on,” Adam says, and Ronan pauses with the shovel half lifted, and Adam inspects the soil minutely for anything that might be in it other than dirt.

Then he pulls the seed itself into his lap, holding it steady with his knees, and begins to peel away the layers of what looks like metallic rock to Ronan, but are clearly too thin to be rock. This he tosses into the water as well, and Ronan watches him go over every inch of the surface of the seed, and then check the ground just to make sure, and then nod as though satisfied. 

“Okay, let’s plant it,” Adam says, and Ronan feels like he’s barely following along with what is happening, but digs the hole with the shovel until Adam tells him it’s deep enough, and when Adam carefully lowers the enormous seed into the earth, Ronan takes earth out from around the bushes to fill in the hole, earth he is already pretty sure isn’t contaminated by whatever it is Adam had been trying to get rid of from the soil and off the seed itself.

As soon as the seed is completely covered and the soil tamped down on top of it, a tiny shoot springs forth out of the ground, and then a dozen more shoots, all in different places, and then a hundred shoots, slowly growing upward into the willowy, graceful body of a young woman. She is clearly made of a tree, but she is also clearly made of flesh and blood, Ronan can see the outline of both inside her.

“We have to get rid of the water,” Adam says, grasping Ronan by the forearms. “She’s a tree-light, and if we leave her here, she’s going to drown. The water will slowly take over this place, followed by the prickly bushes, and she’ll be consumed.”

Ronan looks around at the pool of water with consternation, not even sure how to begin to get rid of this much water, and the prickly bushes are waiting right outside the sphere of it. “The bushes,” Ronan says.

“Don’t worry about the bushes, I think she’ll bloom too fast for the bushes to take her over, but the water has to go. Can you dream it gone, Ronan? We haven’t talked about you ever dreaming anything in the real world to be gone, is it possible?” Adam’s fingertips are biting white indentations into the skin of Ronan’s forearms, and Ronan finds Adam’s near panic to be contagious.

“Get the rocks out of the bag, all the gardening rocks that you have left. Throw them in the water, try to spread them out evenly, and keep them close to the shore. I’m going to try to dream her some dry land.”

Adam doesn’t even hesitate, Ronan hears the plops as the stones fall into the water, and surely if Adam can direct what Ronan dreams in the gardens, then Ronan can do the same thing. It might be harder, it might be more like bringing an object from a dream and into the real world, but he has to try.

He falls down on his back at her feet, watching her spin a little, as though she’s still not connected to the earth through her tree heritage or from her flesh and blood heritage. He thrusts his fingers into the dirt beneath him, feeling everything about it, the weight, the temperature of the soil, the amount of moisture in the soil, everything about it that he can hold in his mind, and then he chases himself down into dreams, doing it faster than even Kavinsky’s pills had done it, and he can feel the pieces of their gardens close by and his attention strains toward the well while he digs his fingers into the soil and feels it in every way that he possibly can. He feels the marks on the stones Adam had thrown into the water calling him like magnets, and he strains for the rocks first, building them up into a bigger chunk of land and changing them as he does, but it’s not going to be enough of a change, and he can feel the water, not inimical in and of itself, but just in the way, just going to drown her before she can properly be born as the prickly bushes tumble into the water and create more water from themselves. He feels the earth in his mind and in his hands, the weight of it, the coarse but moist texture, the temperature of it, slightly warm where the seed had plummeted to earth (to earth, do the tree-lights come from space, and because of that, always yearn for the stars?) and he feels the power of the ley line not far away and he draws from it, he pulls from it as he’s only ever pulled from Cabeswater before, but Cabeswater isn’t here to help him do this, only his own power, and he feels Adam’s hands on his temples guiding him to the line, showing how it is and is not like Cabeswater and when he strains to pull it all together, the power of the line, the of the creation the land, the water draining away, he pushes harder than he has ever pushed, harder than he has ever concentrated, forces the floodplain back with more of the soft, rich soil that crowns the top of the hillock, and he can feel the prickly bushes and the water itself fighting him, but with the strength of the ley line behind it, with the well from the Stand to nurture it, with Adams absolute devotion to the task, and with his own, waning and straining energy he _pushes_ , he _makes it so,_ he bends what is real to what is real in his mind, and then blackness overwhelms him and for a little while, he is gone.

\--

When he wakes up, there are two people leaning over him, Adam and a girl with long and windswept hair, her eyes both new and ancient, her face heart shaped and lovely. Her eyes are forest green, her hair ash blond. She jerks back a little when he opens his eyes, and says, “Greywaren,” and then she’s on her knees and helping him sit up, and she is strong, he can feel the strength of the tree in her limbs, but she looks completely human. The tree growing beside them is a beech tree, bigger than the one behind Blue’s house, and she lays her hand on it fondly and a little proprietarily.

“The water!” Ronan demands, “The bushes!” but once he is upright he can see for himself, the water is completely drained out of the land and they’re lying on a field of soft grass, and he doesn’t see any of the prickly bushes within sight of this land that he’d half built in dreams and half pulled out of dreams.

“It’s still there, the water,” Adam says. “You just pushed it out, Ronan, at least a mile, you _dreamed_ enough soil for her to grow in and the water ran down the hillsides you made.”

“In Cabeswater, the other tree-lights would have made a place ready for me,” she says, her voice completely unaccented English. “They feel when one of us will fall, and where we will land, and they dig the trenches and peel the protective layer off the seed and bury us so that our roots grow deep. Then they name us, to connect us to our trees. You have already done what all the other tree-lights would have done to prepare my way for me, so it seems only right that you should give me my name, and grant me my realm of influence.”

Adam and Ronan exchange looks. Adam shrugs a little with one shoulder, and Ronan says, “Would… would Aurora be a good name.”

She smiles at him. “A very good name, and it is good to reuse names, as they increase in power with every iteration. I would not have survived here without you, Greywaren. The water was too deep, and there were no other tree-lights to protect me while I was young and weak. But you have already grown me past the point of weakness, and I can defend myself now. Your Magician has been telling me what it is you intend to do.”

“You were out for almost an hour,” Adam says. “I would have worried, but she said you were just tired, that you had drawn power from everything around you to midwife her into the world. She says a tree-light is even more likely to help draw Cabeswater back to the ley line. She says they resonate on the same frequency, more or less. You _created_ the soil around us, Ronan, you _dreamed_ it while I watched you. It poured out of you, lifting you on it, lifting us all on it.” Adam looks dazed and amazed. “And she... Aurora says it’s exactly the kind of soil she needs, that you just made more of what was already around her, and watered her from the well. It’s why she grew so quickly, her tree I mean.”

Aurora laughs. “I am the tree and the tree is me. It’s true I could occupy another tree if something were to ever happen to this one, but it would not be the same as my own tree, my own roots burrowing into the earth and branches stretching to the sky.” She kneels down beside Ronan and points into the distance, so that he’s following the line of her finger. “There is the water. It cannot climb this far, and I am in no danger from it. It is good that you came when you did. My seed was beginning to deteriorate without any other tree-lights to strip off the protective layer. I would have died before I could have ever been born.”

“Did you come from space?” Ronan asks her, and her brow wrinkles a little in puzzlement, and then opens up in understanding.

“From the stars, yes. And I will forever yearn to grow tall enough to reach them again.” Her voice is profoundly sad. “But it is the way that we live, and someday I may be tall enough to touch the stars again.” She rests her hand on the trunk of the already mighty beech they are all sitting at the foot of. “Already you have given me centuries of growth with the power you have passed into me. The rest I will have to do on my own.”

“What about the prickly bushes?” Ronan wants to know. “What’s going to protect her from them if they come back?”

“I don’t think they will come back, Ronan,” Adam says. “She was meant to be in Cabeswater, but she’s not. She’s in one of our gardens, and prickly bushes only chew away the edges of the substance of Cabeswater. She’s… more in the real world than any of her kind have ever been before. I don’t think they can hurt her.”

“And I have defenses of my own,” she says, and holds up her hands. “If they begin to try to creep up my hillside, I can come out and pluck them out of the soil with my own hands.”

“Is it safe for you to touch them?” Ronan asks.

“As safe for me as it is for you. When I am in this form, I am as human as you are, more or less,” she says.

“It was Adam that knew to peel off the protective layer,” Ronan says. “I thought you were a meteorite.”

Aurora laughs like the chiming of bells. “Then I owe you both my life, but I would have helped if I owed only one.”

“Helped how?” Ronan asks.

“She can wake up any tree-lights that are left in the area, and they can sing to Cabeswater,” Adam says. “If there are only a few, it might not make much of a difference, but them combined with the Dreaming Ring might speed up the process.”

She stands, all willowy grace, and offers Ronan her hand, and then drags him to his feet with enormous strength. “You must go back to the well,” she tells him. “Replenish your strength there, or it will fail you before you complete all that you plan for today. I do not say this only for your own sake; I wish Cabeswater restored, I wish to be surrounded by my brothers and sisters, not left stranded alone on this hilltop, no matter how much I owe you for dreaming it for me.”

“I don’t know if there will be any left,” Ronan admits. “The demon unmade so much of Cabeswater, I don’t know if the tree-lights survived.”

“It unmade it only on this plane,” Aurora tells him. “Not in all of its incarnations. There will be tree-lights, still, when you bring it back. They will remember the pain of being unmade, but they will also remember the joy of being remade, as the two of you are doing now. Cabeswater is not unmakeable, at it’s core. It is immortal, and if it is not here, it only means that it has gone somewhere else for a time. Oh, call it back to us, to we three who still need it.”

“There are more than us,” Adam says. “Blue and Gansey and Cheng all still need it. Other people we don’t know probably still need it.”

“Not like we do,” Aurora says. “You are its Magician, and he is its Greywaren, and I am a sister to the tree-lights that dwell within it. No one needs it like we three need it.” She sounds positive of it. “Nor does it need any like it needs the two of you. You are the opposite of the demon. You are remakers. I can feel how close Cabeswater is to this place, how close you have drawn it. It will not take much more power to reinvent itself on this spirit path.”

“Do we just… do we leave you here?” Adam asks. “That doesn’t seem right, leaving you all alone.”

Aurora touches the bark of her beech tree. “I am never alone. And you need me here, to sing those few of us left back into a chorus. And there are a few of us. I can feel their lights burning, still. Go back to the well, drink and replenish your strength. There has not been a Greywaren with as much will as you have working on behalf of Cabeswater in centuries. Use your will. Work your magic on this place.” Then she grins impishly. “Visit me, once the magic has settled and Cabeswater has returned.”

“We will,” Ronan says, and she takes his hand in both of hers.

“Thank you for your mother’s name, Greywaren. I will bear it with pride.”

“H-how did you know it was my mother’s name?” Ronan stammers.

“It rings in your voice, your love for her and your loss of her. Nothing rings in a voice like that except for the name of a mother,” she says. Her eyes gleam. “Refresh yourself. Finish what you have begun. I will wait here, and I will raise my voice in song with those of my people that are left and we will help you to dream the forest into the world again.”

They walk straight down the hillside and into the Dell, the two nodes so close now that Ronan understands the sheer size of what he had dreamed, the real scope of it, and no wonder he’s so fucking tired, dreaming that much raw earth out of nothingness. Adam bears his weight up part of the way, and helps him crawl under the finger of granite that leads them back to the path that will take them to the Stand.

The trees in the Stand seem to be expecting them. 

_Refice tua, Greywaren. Sensimus opus quod operatus es in præsentem diem._ ‘Refresh your strength, Greywaren. We felt the work that you have done this day.’

And the bucket is sitting on the edge of the well, as though waiting for him, though Ronan is sure he’d thrown it down into the water before he’d left last time.

Still, the water smells just as sweet, tastes of that exotic nectar, and he feels strength wash back into him like a breeze blowing against his face.

“Gratias tibi,” he says, and the trees whisper that there is no need for thanks, that the Greywaren has already provided as much thanks as will ever be needed when he protected the well.

When they say, _Refice tua, Magus,_ Adam drinks, Ronan thinks not because he feels tired the way that Ronan had, and needs to be refreshed, but because the trees had offered, and he doesn’t want to be impolite. He merely sips from the bucket, and then like Ronan, he pours the rest of the water back into the well and drops the bucket in after it.

They make their way back through the Dell, staying well away from the table, and when they reach the hilltop the giant beech is standing on, Aurora is nowhere to be seen, and so must be inside it, making contact with the other tree-lights that had survived the destruction of Cabeswater.

Adam pauses to shuffle and pick a card.

The Sun.

“We don’t have any stones to make a path,” Ronan says when they reach the bottom of the enormous hill on the other side, and Ronan has to look back over his shoulder to reconfirm that he did, in fact, bring that much earth along with the grass that is growing atop it, out of a dream. There is no water and no prickly bushes they can see directly in front of them, just plain Henrietta fields.

“We’ll have to do without,” Adam says. “How far do we have to go?” 

“The next node isn’t far. Maybe three quarters of a mile. How did you know what to do, Adam. How did you know what it was?” Ronan demands.

Adam is silent for several long moments, before he finally answers, “I think Cabeswater told me. Not live, but in memory. It was like I could remember a tree-light coming before, and I just knew what to do.”

“Thank God,” Ronan says. “I would have let her smolder away in that pit and not have had a single idea about what to do about it. I would have skipped to the next node. She’s strong, could you feel her? Just having her in the gardens is another place where the gardens generate energy on their own.” 

“Oh, I could feel her,” Adam says. “She looks to me like she’s almost surrounded by motes of light most of the time. I would blink, and she would look like a girl, and then blink again, and she would look like a girl made out of stardust.”

“I didn’t see that,” Ronan says, a little disappointed.

“I think it has to do with being the Magician,” Adam says, and they keep walking. 

They don’t see a single prickly bush along the way, even as they get close to the node, which is a mound in the earth that rests between two cedars.

Adam stops Ronan before he can walk up to the top of the mound. “Ronan, this is a barrow mound,” he says uneasily.

Ronan has to shuffle through things Gansey has told him at some distant time in the past to pull the definition of ‘barrow mound’ up in his mind. “You mean it’s a place where someone is buried?” he finally asks.

“Yes. Probably someone important, and probably pretty old, from as tall as those cedars are. I don’t know if the occupant of this place would necessarily like to be made part of the gardens we are trying to build to bring Cabeswater back.”

As if in answer, blue flowers bloom all over the top of the mound all at once, curling out of the ground and growing stalks and buds and opening out into flowers all in the space of a few seconds.

“Or maybe they would,” Adam says, sounding surprised but pleased. “I don’t guess that it makes sense that any barrow mound we come to might contain something that doesn’t want Cabeswater back.” He hesitates, and then makes his way up the side of the barrow mound to stand on the top of it. He shivers a little, but pauses to shuffle his deck and draw a card.

The Sun.

He looks a little puzzled by it, but crosses the barrow mound and walks down the other side of it, waiting for Ronan. Ronan feels that spot at the top of the mound, that little shiver, as if of disturbed air, but it doesn’t hurt him as he walks through it, and he walks down the other side to join Adam.

“Still nothing to make a path,” Ronan says.

Adam shakes his head. “Any ground we walk counts toward a path,” he says. “Any places we walk with the intent of connecting them together. The physical marking of the path is just easier to keep track of than where we’ve actually walked. Besides, look behind you.”

Ronan looks, and sees where their footsteps have parted the grass atop the barrow mound, and further back still, to where they’ve left a track through the Henrietta fields. It’s not wide, and will probably spring back up within a few hours, but for now, there is still a path, of sorts.

“To the Glade,” Adam says, and Ronan guides them away from the barrow mound in the northwesterly direction of the Glade, which is closer than either of them had expected. The two chunks of quartz that Ronan had seen and recognized as boundary markers of this little piece of Cabeswater are barely a quarter of a mile away, which means the Glade had grown more than they’d realized when they’d walked through it only this morning. It’s not surprising. It’s the biggest piece of Cabeswater they’ve found, and it’s hard to keep track of whether it’s growing and by how much.

“It will be enough of a path?” Ronan asks. “We could ask the trees here for more vines.”

“The path is more metaphysical than physical,” Adam says, not sounding worried at all. “We don’t have to mark off space in the real world as long as the space we’ve marked off in our minds is circular. We should get to the Dreaming Ring. Northeast?”

“Yeah,” Ronan says, and steps forward to lead the way.

It takes them just under an hour to get to the Dreaming Ring, and in Ronan’s mental map, it’s already located pretty close to the center of the uneven oblong that they’re calling a circle. They climb over the wall that contains the evergreens and make their way through the flowers, and then into the middle of the Ring itself, and Ronan can feel it thrumming across his skin, not just goosebumps, like when he’d crossed between the stones before, but almost a rumbling sensation, like something is going on deep underground in the Dreaming Ring that they can’t see, but can only feel the consequences of.

Adam gives him a strained smile. “Are you ready to do this?”

Ronan, who actually feels less strained about the whole thing after talking to the tree-light, smiles back. 

They lie down on the hard packed earth of the Dreaming Ring, and falling asleep is as easy as it has ever been. He feels Adam tuck his hand into Ronan’s before he drifts into sleep, and squeezes it, and Ronan’s mental map is suddenly showing behind his closed eyelids, each point of it marked in deep green, and Adam must have been right about the paths being metaphysical, because he can see the paths between Aurora’s hill and the Barrow Mound just as clearly as he can see the other paths they had walked and walled off with stones. He sees the Dreaming Ring alone in the center of their circle, lit up in red, and he sees the point of deep green where the Dreaming Ring needs to be in order to act as a hub on the wheel of power that may draw Cabeswater back onto the line. He feels Adam’s hand in his, and more than that, feels the power that the two of them create together, and he had known that they were more together than either of them was separately, but it’s the first time he’s gotten a glimpse of how _much_ more power that is. It pulses in the center of the red circle that the Dreaming Ring currently occupies.

Ronan gathers the Ring up, wall and evergreens and all, and holds them in his mental grip, and he feels Adam there, helping him hold them all, and then Adam is exerting gentle pressure on Ronan’s mental grip, moving it down toward the green point where the Ring needs to be, and he understands that Ronan just has to hold it all together, that Adam will be the one to steer it in the direction that it needs to go, that that’s what he’d meant when he’d said he’d be the one reading the map. Ronan merely holds the wall, the evergreens, the ring of flowers, the standing stones, and Ronan and Adam himself in his dreaming mind, and Adam gently guides all that Ronan is holding toward the place where it ought to be, the hub of their imperfect circle, but it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be balanced, and that is what they had been doing the whole time they had been growing the gardens, they had been balancing their power, which is why the Hollow, which is huge, is still in balance with the Stand, which is comparatively small, but puts out a huge amount of energy. It still won’t be perfect, nothing is ever perfect, but the Dreaming Ring itself will help to even out the imbalances in the gardens. It will be a nexus at which point all the gardens coincide, and it will bolster the weaker gardens with power from some of the stronger ones.

As the Dreaming Ring moves closer to the green point on the map at which it needs to be located, their other gardens start to expand, not growing exactly, but sending out tendrils of themselves, offshoots that connect to the Dreaming Ring, and for every offshoot that touches the Dreaming Ring, the power of the Dreaming Ring pulses stronger in their minds.

Finally, Adam settles the Dreaming Ring onto the green point at which it needs to be to become an active part of the gardens, the hub of the gardens, and by this time all of the their gardens have sprouted offshoots of themselves that wrap around the Dreaming Ring, and Ronan can feel the power of the place growing. It needs him to knock down the wall enclosing it, he understands, and does that easily, sweeping it away with a thought, and he knows that it will grow on it’s own to gather up enough power to hopefully pull Cabeswater back onto the ley line, but that it will take time, but he gets the sense of something like hours or days rather than weeks or months, and then the Dreaming Ring is expelling him from sleep at the same time that it is warning him to get away from it, to stay away from their gardens, and let it do its work.

He sits up, and Adam sits up beside him at almost the same moment, and they exchange looks.

“Time to get out of the circle,” Adam says, and Ronan agrees, feels urgent about it, and when they exit the circle of evergreens, which is already growing, Ronan leads the way to the car, which is luckily parked outside of the patch of Henrietta woodland that surrounds the Glade, and thus is not that far away, though they run, because the air is full of the crackle of unspent lightening, the promise of unused power, and it would suck to go to all this work only to get themselves fried by it in its earliest stages.

Ronan drives them back to the Barns in a way that would have gotten him pulled over, if there had been any cops around to see them, and they both collapse on the couch, their bodies trembling with what they can still feel of the unspent power they had set into motion.

“Should we still feel it like this?” Adam asks, his hands shaking, and Ronon merely shakes his head. He isn’t sure.

“I think once the initial burst of power is used up and the Dreaming Ring directs its attention toward Cabeswater, it will stop,” he says, but it’s only a theory.

Adam’s cell phone rings, and it is Calla, who starts the conversation with, “Do you even have a brain in your head. Either of you? Even one brain that you share between the two of you?” Ronan can hear her side of the conversation clearly, because she is shouting into the phone.

“Wha…?” Adam says, but Calla never stops talking.

“We assumed that you would know to come to us before you started anything that was going to start making all kinds of psychic noise, but clearly we assumed wrong. You are both idiots. We could have done a reading to see how to best go about starting this, or at least _when_ would be be the best time to start it, but no, you just had to start is as soon as the magical wheel would start to roll. There are phases of the moon, even phases of the sun, that would have made this safer and less like a goddamn psychic earthquake, that probably would have made your chances of success better, but you couldn’t wait to consult with people that might know something about that before you set the whole damn thing in motion. It would serve you right if the whole thing collapsed and you had to start over from the beginning.”

“Could that happen?” Adam asks, looking a little horrified at the idea.

“It could, but I doubt it’s going to. There’s so much power in it now that Maura and I can’t hear a damn thing over the noise it’s making; we’re having to reschedule clients and appointments and hoping that it is over in just a few days, and if it does go on for more than a few days, then I am personally going to come over there and kick your asses.” She hangs up.

“Maura and Calla are pissed at us for not consulting with them before we started it up,” Adam reports.

“I know. I could hear every word she said. She only has two volumes, loud and shouting,” Ronan says.

Eventually, that initial trembling does start to wear off a little, and Ronan and Adam discover that they are starving, and bring plates of cheese and coldcuts into the living room to devour without even making them into actual sandwiches first. Then they huddle together under a blanket Ronan’s mother had made, still trembling and shaking in fits and starts, but exhausted as well, and unwilling to try the stairs with as shaky as they both feel.

They wake up that way the next morning, tangled together on the couch after having slept in all their clothes, but the shaking and trembling seems to have pretty much passed in the night. They get up and shower and Ronan makes omelets for breakfast, and neither of them says what both of them are thinking, which is: How are they going to know when Cabeswater comes back if they can’t get near enough to it to see any of the parts of it that they had created?

Ronan realizes almost cataclysmically late that he’s due at Mass that morning, and struggles into a suit and tie. Adam, having only one suit, and that one just a little snug on him due to the muscle he’s managed to put on, changes quickly, and they make it into the church at the tail end of the line, but before the doors are closed, so that’s what counts. The Lynch brothers and the Lynch dream-sister are sitting at the end of their usual pew, and Ronan and Adam slide in past their legs and settle onto the wood of the benches. Declan looks at Adam, brows raised in question, and Ronan gives him a bland look that he is aware that drives Declan crazy. Opal climbs over Matthew to cling to Ronan, whispering “Kerah!” into his ear, and then something in Latin that he doesn’t catch because the organ starts up, and Opal returns to her seat between Matthew and Declan, which seems to please Declan.

Ronan whispers to Adam when to stand and when to kneel and when to sit and wait while everyone else takes communion. Opal doesn’t take communion either, and she gives him a meaningful look while the Lynch brothers do so. Ronan isn’t sure if the look she gives Adam is meant to be a look of solidarity, sympathy, or both.

After Mass, Ronan invites Declan, Matthew, and Opal to the Barns, more because he feels like he has to, although if he’s honest, if Declan weren’t there, he’d probably want to, but Opal flatly refuses to go anywhere near the Barns while the forest is “budding.” That’s how she says it. That the forest is “budding.” Adam and Ronan exchange hopeful looks, and Declan says they should just go out for lunch instead, and so they get tuna fish sandwiches at the Malt Shoppe and Drug Emporium on Henrietta’s main drag. 

Matthew does most of the talking, filling them all in on the progress Opal is making, which makes Matthew, Declan, and Opal all look proud of themselves, and when Declan asks Adam if he’s ready for Stanford in the fall, Adam says that the reckons he is, though he knows it’s going to be a different world than what he’s used to. Declan, in his most condescending voice, reassures Adam that this is a good thing, and Ronan practically bites a hole in his tongue trying to keep from responding to that in a way that would make Adam unhappy. They manage to keep to talk that is mostly idle after that, and Ronan kills the light chit chat entirely at the end of lunch when he tells Adam it’s time to go home, they’ve got shit to do around the Barns.

Declan asks, almost politely, “Oh, are you staying at the Barns with Ronan?”

Before Adam can answer, Ronan says, “Don’t worry, we’re not doing it in your bed.”

Matthew seems more puzzled by the exchange than anything, Opal seems amused, and Declan seems embarrassed, but Adam forces Ronan to admit on their way back to the Barns in the BMW, not in a bigoted way, just in a ‘my younger brother is doing it’ kind of way. Ronan laughs a little viciously at that, but doesn’t disagree, although he notes nastily that as long as Declan has being doing it, and with how many people, he doesn’t really have a moral leg to stand on.

“How would you feel if you found out Matthew was doing it?” Adam asks, his expression almost bland, but Ronon chokes on a mouthful of spit he’d inhaled by accident, and throws Adam a poisonous look.

Ronan makes beef stroganoff for dinner, and Adam eats like he’s never eaten before in his life, in spite of the tuna sandwiches they’d had at lunch, and Ronan can’t help but be a little bit pleased when Adam says it may be the best thing he’s ever eaten in his life.

“I’ll teach you to make it,” Ronan says. “It’s not all that complicated. One day next week.”

“It tasted complicated,” Adam says, sitting with his back against Ronan’s chest on the couch as Ronan flips haphazardly through channels, never stopping on one long enough to even see what’s showing. “Give me that, you’ll never find anything to watch doing it like that,” and they end up falling off the couch and Ronan knocking his head a good one on the coffee table while wrestling for the remote. In retaliation, Ronan turns the TV completely off, certain that Adam will never be able to find the power button on the remote since it’s a dream remote, and thus doesn’t make a lot of practical sense. In retaliation to that, Adam grabs his tarot deck and begins to lay out a long and complicated spread, trying, he tells Ronan, to figure out what is going on with Cabeswater, but complaining that the spread had been a little bit like Ronan flipping through channels at the speed of light, like it had bits of pieces of everything that could be in it, and nothing that definitively would be.

Ronan suggests that he try dream scrying. To find nodes, Ronan had never been able to get a clear image on what he was looking at, but once the nodes had turned into gardens, Ronan had been able to dream of them, just like he’d been able to dream of being in Cabeswater. Adam goes mulish and stubborn about Ronan looking in at what might once again be Cabeswater at some point while the magic is still actively trying to draw it onto the line, claiming that being there mentally might not be that different than being there physically, and that he likes Ronan as he is, not as a drooling idiot, at least most of the time.

Instead, mostly to distract him, Ronan thinks, Adam works Ronan’s jeans down below his knees and gives him a long and thoroughly exploratory blow job, seeming to have a keen sense of when Ronan is getting close to the edge, and then pulling back to just lick and mouth at Ronan’s cock, until the imminent orgasm retreats. Ronan tries to take this with some degree of dignity the first couple of times, and then lapses into profanity the third and fourth times, and during the fifth time, just moans, his body feeling overheated and his mind almost completely empty, and he just manages to gasp out Adam’s name a couple of times and to grab at his hair to pull him back before he comes, but Adam resists the hair pulling and doesn’t stop suckng Ronan all the way to the end, which he swallows much more neatly than Ronan had managed his first time, and then because he’s evil, and knows how oversensitive Ronan is after, he gently licks at his softening cock until Ronan, groaning, pushes him away.

When Ronan is mostly recovered from his orgasm, he kicks his jeans off in the middle of the living room floor and drags his tank top over his head to lie there with them, and leads Adam into his bedroom, where he retrieves a frosted glass container of cream and opens it before handing it to Adam. 

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Adam asks, and Ronan climbs onto his hands and knees on the bed, looking at Adam from over his shoulder.

“It’s the slickest, and it lasts the longests. I think it will be the best if you want to try to fuck me.”

“Ronan,” Adam objects, but there are all sorts of other things tangled up in that objection, like anticipation and want.

“Just go slow. You know to use your fingers, first, to loosen me up?” Ronan asks.

Adam’s face goes hot with blood, but he nods silently. “I… I’ve only ever done it to myself,” he says. 

“Same general principle,” Ronan says. “Adam. I want you to.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Adam half-whispers.

“I’ll tell you if it hurts,” Ronan promises. “From what I know of it, it’s going to feel weird at first, but then it should turn into something really good.” He glances away from Adam for a moment, and then glances back. “That’s just what I know from _my_ fingers.”

Adam crosses the room with the glass jar in his hand and settles between Ronan’s calves, behind him. “Maybe you should… start it off,” he says uncertainly.

“I want you to touch me,” Ronan says. “If you don’t want to, you only have to tell me so once, and I’ll never mention it again. I won’t be upset. I just… want to, and I want it to be you. I’ve imagined my hands were yours before. I wanted them to be yours.”

Adam sets the jar on the bed beside them and dips the first two fingers of his right hand into the dream stuff. “You tell me right away if I hurt you,” Adam says, voice unsteady.

“I will,” Ronan says. “And you can use as much of that stuff as you think you need. After about two hours, it just sort of evaporates off your hands and the sheets. I don’t know how that works, but don’t worry about making a mess.”

Ronan feels the backs of Adam’s hands pressing gently at the insides of his thighs, and gets the message that Adam wants him to spread his legs more. He does, stopping only when Adam stops pressing, though he can feel his face is hot, and his whole body is tingling with anticipation and nerves. Adam brushes the slick dream stuff against Ronan’s ass, rubbing gently at his hole with the pad of one finger. Ronan has done this to himself often enough that it doesn’t scare him at all, just makes him whisper out a soft moan of encouragement, and Adam, taking him at his word, slips the tip of one finger carefully inside him. 

The dream stuff is slick, however, and Adam’s finger slips inside about halfway, clearly startling Adam so that he pulls back quickly, but he doesn’t pull out all the way. He presses his finger back into Ronan about halfway again, and Ronan trembles a little at the feeling of having Adam’s finger inside his body. Adam draws his finger out, going back for more dream stuff, and this time is a little bolder, slipping one finger entirely inside Ronan, who can’t quite keep back a groan. Adam slides his finger inside Ronan for several long seconds, then turns his wrist and seems to be pressing against Ronan inside with just the tips of his fingers, maybe just stretching Ronan, but then a white bolt of hot pleasure arcs up Ronan’s spine and he lets out a little cry of surprise, his back bowing into a downward arc, and he’s founds his own prostate before, but it’s never felt like it does when Adam brushes across it, maybe just because he can’t get his fingers angled right, but Adam presses all the way around that area, apparently until he’s sure he knows exactly where it is, and then lets out a soft laugh when he pulls his finger out of Ronan to go back to the jar of dream stuff. 

This time when he slicks up Ronan’s hole, he presses forward with two fingers at once, and there is a kind of stretchy feeling that Ronan is familiar with when he’s tried to use more than one finger in himself at once, but entirely without the burning sensation that had accompanied those experiments. Adam goes straight for his prostate again, and Ronan moans aloud, not quite able to keep it back, as Adam’s fingers press against him inside. Then Adam stretches his fingers apart, pulling Ronan’s hole open as he does, and Ronan’s face burns a little at the idea of what it must look like, but can’t deny that Adam is right, Adam is smart, there is no way Adam’s cock is going in there without Ronan’s hole being stretched open for it. It’s not something Ronan has ever done to himself, has never needed to, but he has access to the internet and has seen his share of porn -- at this point he realizes that Adam must have seen or read at least his own share of porn, too, to know to do that, and he’s so surprised at the idea of Adam watching porn that he almost loses track of what they’re doing, until Adam’s fingertips brush up against his prostate again, and then he remembers abruptly -- so he knows how it’s supposed to work, and Adam alternates between pressing his fingertips against Ronan’s prostate, and then widening his fingers, spreading them apart, stretching Ronan out, and honestly they both feel good, the stretching a little strange, but it’s still Adam touching him, so it is good, and he’s as hard as iron again in spite of Adam’s leisurely cocksucking not that long ago.

When Adam pulls his fingers out of Ronan, Ronan makes a disgruntled sound of objection, but doesn’t complain out loud because he knows what comes next. This time even with the dream stuff, three of Adam’s fingers pressing into him is enough to burn a little, but Ronan likes it, likes the feel of the burn widening him so that he’s loose enough to take Adam’s cock, and he only lets out a hoarse little cry. Even so, Adam pauses, draws back a little, and then pushes in more slowly. “Hurry,” Ronan whispers, not quite able to stop himself from laying himself so bare in front of Adam, and in spite of it, Adam doesn’t hurry, he stretches Ronan with three fingers and slides the pads of his fingers against Ronan’s prostate, and now Ronan rocks back a little against that slide, feeling it go from a slide to a rub, and letting out another encouraging sound, this one coming out verging on urgent. “Adam,” Ronan says, and then isn’t sure what else he wants to say except, “Hurry,” again, and Adam groans a little, stretching his three fingers as wide as he can, Ronan can feel them pushing him open, and he’s pretty sure it’s going to hurt at first, Adam’s cock, that it’s just bigger than even three fingers, and that it’s going to burn, but he hardly cares about it. He can live with a little burn, even likes it, and he really wants Adam inside him, wants to feel Adam’s cock pushing him open instead of his fingers. 

He gasps when Adam pulls out all three of his fingers, scooping up a dollop of the dream stuff, and Ronan can hear him slicking up his cock. Then he maddeningly moves the jar to the bedside table and even puts the lid on it, as if any of that were important now, before he finally presses the tip of his cock against Ronan’s asshole, and Ronan feels so relieved that he actually goes kind of loose all over, and Adam pushes forward carefully, gently, and there is a little bit of a stretch at the head of Adam’s cock slides into Ronan, but it is by no means pain. “Yes,” Ronan whispers, and feels Adam shudder where he’s pressed against Ronan, and then Adam is easing into Ronan, going slow and Ronan had been right, it does burn a little, he can feel himself stretching inside to accommodate Adam’s width, but it drags a moan out of his throat that is so needy that Ronan had never in his life imagined that he could make such a sound. Adam moans in response, his moan almost as needy as Ronan’s, but he still pushes in slow and careful, his hands, one of them still slick from the dream stuff grasping at Ronan’s hips, and Ronan would like to push himself back onto Adam’s cock and take it all at once, but feels certain that Adam would be too concerned to go on, and Ronan wants Adam to go on, so he stays still, lets Adam work his way inside slowly, listens to Adam breathing like he’s going for a three minute mile, and when Adam bottoms out, Ronan lets out another of those needy groans.

“Okay?” Adam asks, panting, voice hoarse, but still stopping to ask when Ronan can only imagine how it must feel for _him_.

“Yes, good, but harder and faster, Adam, I want it,” Ronan gasps out, and realizes that he’s breathing almost as harshly as Adam is.

Adam draws back and the pushes back in, both quicker and harder, though not as hard as Ronan wants it, but Ronan breathes, “Yes,” out through clenched teeth, and Adam gasps out something desperate and needful, and this time when he drags his cock out of Ronan, he shoves it back in, and the head of Adam’s cock drags across Ronan’s prostate, and Ronan sucks in a sound of pleasure that doesn’t make it out again as a noise and can’t keep himself from rocking back onto Adam’s cock anymore, and Adam doesn’t object, just groans as Ronan angles his body so that Adam’s cock drags along his prostate, and lets out harsh, sex-roughened grunts every time he bottoms out inside Ronan. 

“I’m not going to last,” Adam says, though Ronan is quietly impressed that Adam has made it as long as he had, and reaches down between his legs and jerks at his own cock.

“One more minute,” Ronan begs, and Adam groans, but keeps thrusting furiously into Ronan while Ronan strips his cock roughly, feeling the orgasm building deep in the pit of his belly and wedged against the base of his spine. It comes in a ferocious blast, forced out by Adam’s cock slamming into him, and Ronan cries out, barely keeping himself from tipping forward on his face by dropping down onto one elbow while he jerks his cock.

Adam hisses, “Jesus, Ronan, Jesus, you feel so good, you’re so tight and hot inside, I can’t…”

“It’s okay,” Ronan slurs, “Go for it, let it go,” and he feels Adam’s thighs bunching against the backs of his and his hips snapping forward in four or five vicious thrusts, and then Adam chokes out a cry, his hands biting into Ronan’s hips, pressing his cock into Ronan as deep as it will go and just shuddering there, pressed inside him, so that Ronan isn’t sure if he’s imagining the jerking of Adam’s cock inside him or if he can really feel it. Then Adam’s breath comes out in a rush, and he half collapses atop Ronan’s back, but Ronan has both hands under him again and can hold up his weight, so he doesn’t mind. 

For a minute or so, Adam just breathes like he’s relearning how to do it, lying propped up against Ronan’s back, before he eventually pulls himself slowly out of Ronan, both of them gasping a little at losing that essential connection, and rolls off of Ronan’s back onto his side on the bed. His face is flushed and his eyes are dark, and he looks utterly wrecked, and Ronan, half in wonder, thinks, _I made him look like that,_ and he can’t wait to do it again. He’d like to fuck Adam, too, but he can wait for that until Adam feels ready for it, especially if Adam will fuck him in the meantime.

Adam’s eyes slowly focus on Ronan’s face, still glittering and dark, the pupils blown wide, and he says, “I didn’t hurt you?” like he just has to check for sure, or like Ronan can’t be trusted to tell him if it had hurt at any point.

“There was a stretchy kind of feeling when you added a third finger -- I’ve only ever managed two of my own -- and then more of that stretchy kind of feeling when it was your actual cock, but no, it in no way hurt. It was faintly uncomfortable until the head of your cock bumped against my prostate, and then the only thing I could think of was how to get you to do it again, only harder and faster.” Ronan grins at him. “I’d like to fuck you, too, but I’m willing to wait until you’re sure you’re ready for that as long as you’re still willing to fuck me.”

Adam, blushing, smiles back. “I’m willing, that was. It was so good, Ronan. It was the best thing I’ve ever felt.” He looks at Ronan sideways from the way he’s laying on the bed. “I was pretty sure it was going to go alright when I found your prostate,” he says. “I can only sometimes find mine. I think it depends on what position I’m in when I’m trying to reach it. I think once I was inside you, it was how you were kneeling that let me hit your prostate. I couldn’t tell with my cock the way I can with my fingers, except by the way you reacted.”

“I know how I learned about fucking and prostate stimulation,” Ronan says. “I read a lot of porn. Watched some, too, but it never did as much for me as reading it. Where did you learn about it?”

“Same, and same,” Adam says. “Although I watched quite a bit before I found a place where I could read about it, which is the reason I know more than insert cock into asshole. If I’d only ever just seen it, I wouldn’t have known there was more to it. I probably would have screwed it all up.”

“You didn’t screw it up,” Ronan says wryly. “If you had not screwed it up any more thoroughly, I probably would have passed the fuck out when I came.”

Adam laughs. “I know you can reach around and grab your partner’s cock and jerk him off at the same time that you’re fucking him, but I honestly wasn’t sure I had enough brainpower to do both. Maybe once I get a little more practice I’ll be able to get you off and me off at the same time.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ve got time to practice whatever we want,” Ronan says lazily. He slumps down on his side onto the bed and directly into the wet spot. “Goddamnit,” he says. Adam’s brows arch in question. “I wasn’t looking what I was doing and just landed with my hip in the wet spot.”

Adam snickers, and Ronan smacks him lightly across the chest with the back of his hand. “I’ll change the sheets while you take a shower,” Adam says. “I’m pretty sure I’ll be okay with just a thorough wipe down, but you’ll probably want to figure out a way to…” he trails off, flushing, but Ronan can guess what he was about to say, and is encouraged by the fact that Adam even _almost_ said it.

“I’ve got something,” Ronan says. “I dreamed it.”

Adam’s expression goes from intrigued to embarrassed to intrigued again, and Ronan can see him deciding not to ask. 

“I’ll show you how to use it the first time you need it,” he says, grinning wickedly. This only makes Adam blush even more furiously, and Ronan cackles with amusement.

“You’re a terrible person, Lynch,” Adam says, but Ronan doesn’t believe he means it when Adam’s eyes are taking a leisurely stroll across all of the parts of Ronan’s body that he can see. Not that Ronan’s eyes aren’t doing more or less the same thing to Adam’s body. “Get in the shower and use your… thing,” Adam says, and shoves at Ronan until he has to get off of the bed or fall off of the bed. 

“My favorite part with you is the afterglow, Parrish,” Ronan sneers, and then makes his way into his bathroom and gets in the shower, where he uses a simple little bulb that fills up with water to rinse the lube and come out of his ass. As he’s doing it, he imagines doing it to Adam, and perhaps unsurprisingly finds himself at half mast again. He re-uses the towel he’d used that morning because he needs to restock his own bathroom with towels, not to mention just doing laundry in general. He decides when he comes out of the bedroom and finds that he’s out of black jeans that he will do laundry with what’s left of the day. He throws on a pair of sweat pants and doesn’t bother with a shirt, and begins gathering up piles of dirty clothes from his bedroom floor. Adam, who has just finished making his bed with what look like military corners, watches for several long seconds before he says anything.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m knitting a sweater,” Ronan says, and snags a pair of boxers where they are hiding half under the bed. “I’m doing laundry, Parrish, what does it look like I’m doing.”

Adam sits down on the edge of the bed, shoulders shaking silently, and after a moment, Ronan realizes that he’s laughing.

“What’s funny about laundry?” he asks.

“Just… just, you, doing it,” Adam says breathlessly. “I think I assumed that when you ran out of clothes you just went and bought more.”

Ronan considers this. “I’ve done it occasionally,” he admits. “But for the most part, I just wash the ones I already have.”

“Where is the washing machine? I’ve got to wash some stuff, too,” Adam says.

Ronan shows him the laundry room, which is in the basement. The washer and the dryer have unusual settings. The washer has ‘delicates’, ‘jeans and t-shirts’, ‘reds’, and ‘towels.’ The dryer has ‘regular clothes’ and ‘towels or jeans.’

“And you grew up not knowing that this was in any way weird?” Adam asks.

“My mom did all the laundry while I was growing up,” Ronan says. “I didn’t even know about the settings until I came back here after Monmouth. That’s true of most of the stuff in the kitchen, too. That was mom’s territory. I just figured out how to use everything once I moved back in.” He loads laundry into the washer and sets it to ‘jeans and t-shirts’ and pushes the only button on the machine. He goes back up to gather up towels from both bathrooms and the remainder of the clothes he hadn’t been able to carry in his arms down the stairs.

“The washer isn’t hooked up to a water line or a drain, and the dryer isn’t vented anywhere. I also don’t think it’s either electric or gas,” Adam says.

“I know,” Ronan says, grinning like a shark. “It keeps the utilities low.”

“Why didn’t you use a laundry basket for all of that?” Adam asks. “There are three on the floor of the linen closet.”

“I guess I just never noticed them,” Ronan says. “At Monmouth we didn’t own any, and I never did my own laundry before Monmouth. It’s possible I didn’t realize that was what they were for.”

Adam, looking like he’s holding back laughter, goes back upstairs and brings his clothes down in what is apparently a laundry basket. Once Ronan sees one being used, they make perfect sense, and he isn’t sure why he’d never made the connection before. So much less chance of dropping your clean laundry on the floor with one of those.

“Okay, so I might lack some basic life skills,” Ronan says, and Adam puts his basket of laundry on the folding table and rubs his back in small, soothing circles.

“You’ll learn. And you have lots of other skills,” he says, and even sounds like he means it. “You can cook. And you can drive. And you can grocery shop like an adult. And you can speak Latin. And you can possibly help pull off a kind of magic that’s never been attempted before in the history of the world.”

Ronan grins a little. “And I can dream,” he says. “Which means you should let me dream you a better car.”

“Under no circumstances are you allowed to mess with my car, Lynch,” Adam says forbiddingly. “If you want to dream me something, you can dream me tools to work on it with. When I leave Boyd’s, I’ll lose all access to the tools I use to keep it running.”

“What kinds of tools? I’d need to see them and hold them, know the weight of them in my hands. To dream something, it either has to be something entirely out of my own mind, or a replica of something I’ve handled enough to be completely familiar with it. When is your birthday?”

“You’re not buying me tools for my birthday, Ronan,” Adam says. “Tools are expensive.”

“Trying to dream something I have no knowledge of is expensive in other ways. Expensive in time and energy,” Ronan tries to explain. “I can do it, and if that’s the only way you’ll let me do it, then I’ll come to work with you every day I can and spend the time learning what each one of them is and what it feels like and looks like and all that. But it would be easier and cheaper for me to buy them for you. You can pick out what you need then, and I won’t have to guess, and maybe end up creating you a bunch of tools that won’t quite be right when you try to use them.”

Adam thinks about that for a long moment. “It was July the third,” he says finally. “And you let me pick out what to get. I have plenty of time to get top tier tools, if I even need them, once I graduate. What I need now are just the tools I need to keep my car running.”

“Deal,” Ronan says, pleased. “I didn’t know we all missed your birthday. Happy Birthday.”

Adam smiles, wide and genuine. “Thank you, Ronan. I’ve never had much to celebrate, so I never made much of it. Now maybe I’ll have someone to do things with on my birthday.”

“Bet your ass,” Ronan says. “Come on, let’s get out of the laundry room. It will beep upstairs when the load is done.”

Adam follows Ronan up the stairs. “Where does it beep from?”

“The whole bottom storey of the house can hear it. I’m not sure where it actually comes from,” Ronan says carelessly. “It was just to let mom know the laundry was done.” Ronan is silent until they get upstairs. “We’ve got to get the sheets off the guest bed, too,” he says, and goes to investigate the laundry baskets in the bottom of the linen closet. He strips the sheets down and shoves them into the basket. “Do you want to think about putting your clothes in my room?” he asks, trying to sound casual about it. “I can clean out a couple of drawers and there should already be closet space.” He gets clean linens for the guest bed from the linen closet and begins making up the bed while Adam seems to be taking an agonizingly long time to answer. He makes the bed and listens to Adam opening and closing drawers in the dresser, and smiles a little in relief.

Two drawers is more than enough space to hold every piece of clothing that Adam owns, and the only thing he has to hang is the suit. Ronan figures he’ll have to hang some of his own jeans in the closet to make up for lost drawer space, but it doesn’t matter. Jeans can go either place, and he’s alway had more closet than he’s ever used. The only things in there are suits for Mass and maybe a couple of old sets of Aglionby uniforms. He wonders if he can dream Adam a bigger suit without Adam noticing. It’s not exactly too small, not yet. But Ronan suspects that with regular meals, Adam might have one more growth spurt left in him. Probably can’t manage the suit. Maybe for his birthday next year? Maybe by his birthday next year Adam will have grown far enough from where he is now to be able to accept such a gift? 

That actually seems like a possibility. Or that he’d be able to accept such a gift from Ronan, at least. Maybe still not from Gansey, but when you’re with someone, things are different.

He carries the basket of sheets from the guest bedroom down to the basement -- it seems unlikely that they’ll get to all of this tonight, so Ronan will make sure Adam’s clothes go in next -- and adds his own bed sheets to the basket, filling it up.

It seems like he must have, at some point, known what a laundry basket was for. He feels like he has vague memories of seeing his mother carrying them, but they’re fuzzy, from when he was young. He looks around the basement and sees a canvas tote looking thing on wheels. It’s both long and wide, but low. When he looks up, he sees that there is a hatch that, if opened, would drop things directly down into it. He goes upstairs and finds the hatch built into a wall of what his father had called the utility room, when he had added it to the house. Mostly what lives there are oddities, like the elephant foot with umbrellas and walking sticks in it. The pogo sticks that had been lined up against the living room wall when Ronan had come back to stay at the Barns. Several rolled up carpets, one of which still has a yellow sticky note on it saying ‘Not this one’ that his father had stuck on it. Things that Ronan had moved out of the main house as superfluous, really. 

He’s not entirely sure that tossing clothes down the hatch and into the enormous canvas wheeled tote-bin he’d seen would be much more useful than carrying them down a basket at a time, but Niall Lynch wasn’t really all that well known for the usefulness of what he did. He’d probably done it thinking Aurora would just have to dump clothes down the hatch and into the canvas tote until it got full enough that she needed to wash clothes without thinking that they’d all probably run out of clothes before the canvas tote was full. Aurora had probably thanked him, and meant it sincerely, and then had proceeded to never use it for anything except for maybe towels, because the linen closet creates towels. Ronan had learned early on not to leave the linen closet empty for more than a week, or else when he had clean towels to put away, the linen closet would already be full of towels again, waiting to be used. He’s not sure if it does the same with bed linens. He’ll have to be sure to get those done tomorrow and put away. As it was, he’d filled the cabinet under the sink in the guest bathroom with the newly washed towels, as well as adding some to his own and Declan’s bathrooms. Matthew, being the youngest, and maybe because Niall Lynch had never gotten around to it, had been the only one of the boys not to have his own half-bath.

Ronan thinks of moving his and Adam’s things into the Master Suite. There would be more room, and it has a full bath. But he’d have to go through all of Niall and Aurora Lynch’s things, clean them out, in order to do that. He pushes the thought to the back of his mind. Maybe someday he could think of doing that, but he’s not ready to have to do it yet. In fact, it sounds like the kind of problem that Declan should be presented with. Declan would be annoyed at the chore, but it wouldn’t… he wouldn’t react to it the way either Ronan or Matthew would. It wouldn’t tear him up inside to see their mother’s and father’s things packed into boxes and carted up into the nooks and crevices of the attic. Then again, maybe that’s a reason why such a chore should _not_ be delegated to Declan. 

Or maybe it should be something that all three of the Lynch brothers should handle together. Matthew would cry and Ronan would be angry with grief and Declan would be calm and matter-of-fact, and maybe all of those things would balance each other out.

Ronan pushes the thought away again. He’ll think of it later. He’ll think of it once Adam comes home for his first break. If it seems like Adam plans to continue to come to the Barns for his school breaks, then he’ll think about cleaning out the Master Suite.

“Hey,” Adam says, coming up to stand behind him and hooking a thumb casually into the waistband of Ronan’s sweats. “What are you doing standing in the dark.”

Ronan hadn’t realized he hadn’t turned on a light. He shakes his head and backs out of the utility room, half herding Adam along in front of him. “It’s just the utility room,” Ronan says. “There’s a hatch that you can throw clothes down. They land in a big wheeled canvas tote thing. I’m pretty sure my dad was trying to do something to make life easier for my mom, but I don’t think she ever used it. By the way, you can’t leave the linen closet empty for more than a week, or it creates new towels. I’m not sure about bed linens, so we’ll have to get those put away in a timely manner, too, but definitely towels.”

“When you say ‘creates new towels,’ do you mean to say that it creates towels from nothingness?” Adam asks.

“I don’t know if it’s from nothingness,” Ronan says. “But they look just like the towels we have now, so I think so. Unless the linen closet is committing larceny every time I don’t get it restocked with clean towels in time.”

“Okay, just so I’m clear on that. Do any of your other closets do that? Kitchen cupboards creating new plates? Anything like that.”

“Not that I know of,” Ronan says. “Except that if you leave dirty shoes in the mudroom, it will clean them overnight. I’ve never been sure how he got that to work.”

“But you know how the endless towel supply in the linen closet works?” Adam asks.

“Sure. Just dream a shelf that, if empty, restocks the shelves every seven days and dream it, and then install it in the linen closet. At least, that’s how I would have done it,” Ronan says. “I didn’t get to it in time the first week I was here, so now there are extra towels in all the bathrooms,” Ronan admits.

Adam laughs and throws an arm around his shoulder, pulling him tight for a moment. “But you figured it out, and it keeps you from putting off washing towels,” Adam says.

“It’s a good thing Matthew didn’t figure it out. He’d take it as permission to never wash another towel again,” Ronan says a little defensively.

“I’m not criticizing,” Adam says, holding his hands out in a peace-keeping gesture. “I’m just making note of how things work here.”

“It’s an ongoing process,” Ronan says. “I’m always finding things that my dad made that do only one thing, or that we could have just bought at a regular store and wouldn’t have had to draw power from the ley line. The coffee maker doesn’t plug in or take water, but you still have to put grounds in it.” Ronan shakes his head. “Some of the stuff he maybe did by accident. I’m willing to bet the linen closet shelf that creates towels was a frustration dream that he just happened to be able to find a use for. Not that I think it’s necessarily a good use, but I can understand it. You’ve got three teenage sons and there are never any clean towels. I can see it happening. But the coffee maker he would have had to have worked for. Unless he was a whole hell of a lot better at bringing things out of dreams than I am, he would have had to make that with intent, for no reason other than to make his life a little easier. Maybe he didn’t know he was drawing power from the ley line, maybe he just thought he was creating something from nothing, but still. It seems wasteful.”

“We can go out and buy a real coffee maker, if it bothers you,” Adam says softly.

“I’m used to it. And it will never break down. And it’s already created, so it doesn’t make a difference now. It’s just not how I would have done it,” Ronan says. “Not, at least, now that I know where that power comes from. Sometimes I can’t help it. Sometimes I dream things so real that they come back with me whether I mean them to or not. But the stuff my dad dreamt for the house just seems… pointless. You can buy a coffee maker for under fifty dollars. You can buy a waffle iron for even less. My mom wouldn’t have minded that those things had to be plugged in to get them to work.” He pauses. “The demon unmade all of my dad’s livestock, which is good, but now, without Cabeswater, I don’t have any way of making sure that Matthew doesn’t go to sleep if something happens to me. That’s what I’d dream if I could just figure out how. Something important. Something that meant something to someone other than just myself.”

Adam comes up behind Ronan and puts his arms around his waist. Ronan lets his head rest back against Adam’s shoulder, letting all of his worry unspool out of him for just a few minutes, and finding it a comfort.

Then they do the dishes, which have been piling up over the last couple of days, and Adam asks why Niall had never dreamt Aurora a dishwasher.

Ronan laughs a little. “I think he just couldn’t figure out how to fit it into the kitchen without it being obvious. Declan, at least, would have noticed, and would have wanted to know where it had come from and where the cabinets went. Though it’s possible he just never thought of it.” Then he shrugs. “And to bring something out of a dream, you have to _know_ it. I mean, you have to know everything about how it feels under your hands and how heavy it is and what it looks like and maybe it was just too big for him to get a good mental grip on. I could do it, I think. I guess if I could dream the Camaro, I could do just about anything I wanted. But we don’t make so many dishes that doing them by hand is that big a chore.”

“No, it’s not,” Adam agrees gently, and then wipes suds on the end of Ronan nose. Ronan sputters indignantly, and they end up in a water fight that they eventually have to clean up with fresh towels from the guest room, but it all feels comfortable to Ronan, homey and good.

They’re sitting on the couch, both of them still a little damp, when Ronan asks, “You really won a ten thousand dollar scholarship?” Not that he doubts it. Just because it seems like something Ronan himself would never be able to do.

“I’ve won about seventeen thousand dollars in scholarships that I know about so far,” Adam says, matter-of-factly, but still without quite hiding that he’s pleased and proud and kind of amazed. “Some of them I won’t know about until closer to when school starts. I figure if I live on even a moderate budget, with Stanford paying for all my books and meals and everything, I can live for at least a couple of years on just scholarship money.”

“Have you decided what you’re going to major in?” Ronan asks.

Adam leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees, clearly thinking. “I always thought I’d go for the political sciences,” he says. “Sociology, and maybe some business classes. I’m not as sure now. I just know that part of what I should be doing is going to school for things that make me happy, and I’m not sure what those are yet.” He gives Ronan a wry look that doesn’t look too steady around the edges. “I wanted… I’ve always wanted to be able to go into any store and pick out any item I wanted and not have to worry if I had enough money in my checking account to pay for it. And that hasn’t really changed. But I’m starting to think that may not be enough. That having the kind of money Gansey has is never going to make me like Gansey, and that I don’t even want to be like Gansey, or at least not much, not anymore. I want… I don’t even know what I want. But the first year is always your primer classes anyway, the stuff you have to take to graduate no matter what you decide to major in, and maybe by then I’ll have a better idea of what I really want.” He leans back against Ronan’s chest, slipping under his arm easily, as though he’s always belonged there.

Ronan plants a kiss on his jaw, seeming to be unable to resist it, and Adam smiles. “You have to teach me to use the remote, though,” he says, as though this is a conversations they’ve been having off and on all day. “It’s not fair if I only get to watch T.V. when you’re around to turn it on for me.”

Ronan reluctantly shows him the location of the power button, and explains all the functions of the other apparently extraneous buttons, and they make popcorn and sit in front of the television for the rest of the night, watching a little of everything and mostly nothing. Ronan likes cooking shows, and Adam will sometimes let him sit through one for long enough to make a whole dish if Ronan promises to make it for Adam the next day. By the time they give up on T.V., Ronan has five or six dinners he’s supposed to make for Adam the next night. He digs through his mind for the ingredients he might have for one or more of them, thinks he has enough on hand for one of them, and is perfectly satisfied.

They get up several times to change the laundry around, taking turns, and when they are done with laundry, only the sheets are left, and Ronan says, “Don’t let me forget those tomorrow, I don’t know if the linen closet refills itself with bed linens.”

Adam laughs with delight and horror, which is pretty much how Ronan feels about the refilling linen closet.

They go to sleep in Ronan’s bed, which now has navy and white striped sheets on it, “Just,” Adam says, “So that they’ll still match the comforter.”

Ronan kisses him for that, but otherwise they just climb into bed quietly, brushing up against each other to get undressed, but not getting handsy, and Adam says, “I can feel Cabeswater… almost. Like you might catch sight of yourself in some surface that is reflective, but isn’t really supposed to be used for that.”

“You think it’s… budding?” Ronan asks, and Adam cocks his head, as though considering the word.

“Can’t think of a better word for it. Just feel like it’s trembling on the edge of being again. I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep,” Adam admits.

“If you can’t sleep, we’ll get back up and make more popcorn,” Ronan says. “For now, just try.”

So Adam slides into bed with Ronan after turning off the light, and Ronan vows to keep the floor of his room free of piles of laundry, because Adam has a much easier time of it tonight than he had the night before.

Ronan doesn’t know about Adam, just knows that he doesn’t wake Ronan during the night, because he dreams of his place in the forest, the one he’d always dreamed of when taking something out of a dream, and doesn’t even realize that this is strange, that he shouldn’t be able to be here at all anymore, until he dreams up a tiny matchbox replica of the Camaro and he wakes up clutching it in his right hand. Adam is awake and watching him, and Ronan realizes that there are leaves and tangled aged vines on the bed, and when Ronan gains control of himself again, he opens his hand and shows Adam the matchbox Camaro and Adam’s eyes grow wide.

“Was it the normal place you go to, or that you used to go to, to dream?” Adam asks, and Ronan nods and begins brushing leaves off of his comforter. The vine had wrapped itself around one post of his bed, and is harder to dislodge, but he eventually gets it.

“It looked the same. Everything felt familiar. And I have dreamed since Cabeswater has gone, but it has always been an in-between dream, a place where I was no place really, and it was harder. I was barely aware of thinking of the matchbox car before I had it in my hand and was waking up and still holding it.”

Ronan turns his face to Adam, sure that it’s hectic with color and excitement. “We should go back today,” he says.

“We should call the women at Fox Way and see if the noise has stopped before we do anything,” Adam says, much more sensibly.

When they call the house at Fox Way, Orla answers the phone, and if Ronan hadn’t recognized her voice, he’d have thought he’d reached a phone sex line. He asks to talk to Maura or Calla, and she says, “Trust me, honey, if you’ve got psychic needs, I’m more than qualified to take care of them for you.” Ronan, stony voiced, merely asks for Maura or Calla again. Orla sighs, a great put upon sound, and says she’ll see who she can find.

It ends up being Maura, for which Ronan is at least a little grateful, and when he asks her if the psychic noise they’d been experiencing has gone away, she clarifies that it is mostly gone, but sounds a little like an open phone receiver, a static hiss that can still receive messages. She doesn’t scold them, like Calla had, but tells him instead to be careful, because she isn’t sure Cabeswater is all the way back yet, that it still may be moving things around to suit it, if it is back, and that they should give it a couple of days. She says she had done a reading which came back a little scrambled, like things are not all yet in their proper places yet, and that it’s safer if they wait at least a couple of more days. Then she tells him that she knows they won’t, so to make sure to use the buddy system.

She says this in such a knowing way that it makes the back of Ronan’s neck flush a little.

Adam, ever cautious, does his own reading, and Ronan watches, wondering at all the cards that come up that he’s never seen before in their trek through the gardens, when he’s seen Adam do readings at least a dozen times by now.

“A better question is why, when I did readings in what was once Cabeswater, the Major Arcana are the only cards that came up. We only once got one of the lesser suits, and even that one was a king.”

Ronan doesn’t get it, so Adam spends a little time filling Ronan in on the way that tarot cards work, the four lesser suits -- a total of fifty-four cards -- and the much fewer cards of the Major Arcana -- twenty-two cards -- and only after this explanation is Ronan able to see how bizarre it is that they’d come up with the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana at every place they had gone to, as though Adam’s deck had been made up entirely of Major Arcana, which Ronan can see from the reading Adam is doing right now isn’t true. “No, she’s right,” Adam is saying from where he’s sitting on the carpet with cards spread out in front of him. “It’s not all back together yet, it’s still… still shuffling itself back into order. I don’t think it would hurt us to go there, but it would be easy to get lost, especially if the trees had been moved around enough that they can’t tell us, yet, which way is out of the forest.” Adam looks up at him, eyes bright. “We should wait at least one more day,” he says. “I know you don’t want to wait, and it will be frustrating, but another day will let Cabeswater settle more firmly back into place on the line, it will give the trees a chance to remember where they are in their new configuration. It would be safer, Ronan.”

Ronan is so little used to caring much for his own personal safety that he almost insists that they go anyway, and then he remembers that he has Adam and he has Matthew and Opal, and that he has reasons, now, to care if he survives, and he says, merely, “Okay. Another day,” in what he hopes is a mostly reasonable tone.

“Ronan,” Adam says wearily, and Ronan doesn’t like it that Adam can sound that weary talking to Ronan after only a few days spent together.

“I’m agreeing with you,” Ronan says defensively.

“I know you are. I just meant to tell you that this is not supposed to be a punishment,” Adam says gently.

Ronan, sitting on the edge of the couch, drops his face into his hands. “I know it’s not,” he says, quiet and muffled by his hands. “But it still feels like a punishment.”

The couch sinks down next to Ronan, and suddenly Ronan is leaning into Adam, his hands still covering his face, but the rest of him being held up by Adam’s wiry strength. “Listen,” Adam says, and then says nothing for so long that Ronan lowers his hands to look at his face and see what he is thinking. “You could dream, today,” Adam says finally. “You could spend the day finding out if you could build me a place separate from Cabeswater, to see if my abilities work within it. You could. I only own two pairs of jeans,” Adam says in a low voice that seems to echo with shame, though Ronan doesn’t understand what he has to be ashamed about. “All my shirts are about worn through. My shoes won’t last another year, and then all I have left are Aglionby shoes and my work boots.” Ronan considers this for several long moments. “Have I ever asked you for anything, Ronan?” Adam says finally, quietly. “All I’m asking is that you spend one more day here with me, doing whatever you want to do, before we go back into Cabeswater, where things are still being unpacked, like when you move, and you don’t know what box the thing you need is in. Cabeswater is like that right now. It’s only half-unpacked.”

Ronan lets out a rumble of low laughter. “Half-unpacked,” he repeats, and slings his arm around Adam’s shoulders, pulling him in so that he’s even closer. “That’s the worst metaphor ever. But yeah, I’ll stay out of Cabeswater today, and it’s better if I don’t dream there either. I don’t usually bring back foliage unless I mean to, so that could mean something. It could mean nothing at all, but it could mean that Cabeswater is still a little scrambled, and it might not be safe to dream. Why don’t we go buy your tools, and if you’ll let me, some jeans and shirts. No underwear though. I refuse to contribute to you wearing underwear.” Ronan gropes Adam playfully through his jeans and underwear. “I can’t get any purchase when you’re wearing underwear. You should stop wearing it altogether.”

So they drive to Richmond, a drive that will take, round trip, most of the day, and Adam’s smile at Ronan’s suggestions of a destination is so wide and grateful that Ronan leans in and kisses it off of his face. Still, a small smile seems to linger, and they remember to put the sheets in the washing machine before they leave, and Ronan and Adam fight about the radio the whole way there, and Cabeswater lingers in the back of his mind, but it’s only one more day, and it’s one more day with Adam, and Adam is going to let Ronan spend money on him because doing it will keep Ronan safe, and Ronan has always secretly wanted to spend money on Adam, but had never wanted to thrust himself up against that wall that Gansey had always managed to run head first into, part Adam’s pride and part Adam’s desire to do for himself, and Ronan understands both of those things, has always had his own share of both, he had just never had to use it to deny himself the kinds of things that Adam has denied himself to be who he thinks he needs to be. 

They go to an outdoor shopping plaza, which is Ronan points out is really just a mall without anything to keep the wind off of you in the winter time, but it’s a beautiful day, not as hot as it has been, and Ronan reads the mall directory until he figures out where you can buy tools at -- there is a Craftsman Outlet -- which Adam objects to as being too pricey, and Ronan insists on because, “We’re already fucking here, Parrish, I’m not driving all the way around Richmond looking for a place to buy you shitty tools.”

Adam gives in, mostly because he’s relieved that he got his way about Cabeswater, and partly, just a little bit, because even what little Ronan knows about tools informs him that Craftsman tools are top of the line. Ronan keeps Adam from short-changing himself by finding a clerk right away and telling them they are looking for everything they need to keep an older car running reliably. The salesman seems to feel like he’s hit the jackpot, and Ronan grabs one of their small yellow plastic carts, ignoring Adam’s insistence that they don’t need a cart, and Ronan listens to the salesman’s pitch like he has any idea of what he’s talking about, but he mostly spends the time watching Adam’s face, and he can see the differences in Adam’s face, his ‘I need this for real’ face versus ‘I’d like to have this, but Ronan shouldn’t have to buy it for me’ face, and he gets pretty much everything the salesman suggests, including a hand held tool box that Adam can keep in the Hondayota, for the things he really might need if he breaks down, and a fancier, low, bench-like tool box on wheels, which Ronan arranges to have delivered while Adam is in the bathroom, which will fit the rest of the tools that won’t fit in the hand held toolbox.

Ronan makes the guy who rings them up at the register turn the display around so that the customer -- meaning Adam -- can’t see it, and forbids him right away to say the total out loud. Adam seems both frustrated and sort of fondly exasperated by this, and volunteers to wait outside. Ronan spends almost a thousand dollars on tools and toolboxes, slips the receipt into his pocket to get rid of later, and pushes the cart out to where Adam is waiting, whistling an Irish jig as he wheels the cart to the BMW and unloads everything into the trunk.

“God, I can’t even ask you what all this costs,” Adam says, but his hands run over the packages of tools greedily as he sorts them into what he needs to go into the toolbox and, then says, “God, Ronan, can I keep some of this at the Barns? I won’t need all of it all the time, and some of it doesn’t make any sense to carry with me.” 

“I’ll build you a garage,” Ronan says, by which he means he’ll dream Adam a garage, because now that Cabeswater is back on the ley line, he’s almost sure he’ll be able to do that, and Adam’s expression goes tender and amazed, and Ronan kisses him right there in the parking lot while Adam holds a package of screwdrivers in one of the hands he has thrown up around Ronan’s neck. “Happy Birthday, Adam,” Ronan says. “Thank you for letting me do this for you. Thank you for keeping me from doing anything stupid today by letting me do things for you that you might not normally be okay with.”

If anything, Adam’s expression goes even more tender, and he murmurs, “I want to keep you. I don’t want you throwing yourself away because you can’t think of a reason to care about your own self-preservation. I would do anything to to make you think of me before you start thinking of something reckless or dangerous that you should do because you can’t think of a reason not to.”

“I do think of you,” Ronan says. “I promise, I’ll keep thinking of you.”

Then they manage to get the rest of the tools packed into the trunk, and Adam wheels the small yellow plastic cart back up to the front of the store, looking slim and neat and gorgeous and desirable and everything Ronan has ever wanted for himself, and that he still can hardly believe is his.

Ronan consults the directory again, and takes Adam to The Buckle, though he’s holding Banana Republic, and the Arizona Trading Company in reserve, if Adam doesn’t find anything he likes at their first stop.

The Buckle may be a little too grunge for Adam’s tastes, though it suits Ronan just fine. He manages to get Adam out of his jeans and into some new ones to try on, and Adam manages to pick out two pairs that he likes and one pair that Ronan likes _on_ him, and they pick out t-shirts and a few button downs with designs stenciled on them, and Ronan is sure these clothes cost more than Adam would dream of spending on clothing in a million years, except that he is going to Stanford, Ronan points out, and he is going to want to have some at least semi-fashionable rags to wear, and Ronan finds a new pair of boots that already look fairly worn, which Adam professes not to really understand, and the sales clerk goes off on a five minute ramble about the ‘distressed look’ being highly marketable right now. Ronan manages to sneak a few extra t-shirts in the pile of clothes that they are making on the counter, one of them with a snake on it, which he thinks Adam will appreciate if he ever gets over being mad at Ronan for buying it for him, and Ronan again makes Adam wait outside while he pays for their five hundred dollars worth of new clothes, though to be fair, more than a hundred of that is Ronan’s new boots. He folds the receipt into his pocket as evidence to get rid of later. 

They take their bags, which it takes both of them to carry, to the BMW, because Ronan says he’s not quite done here, and then they walk around in the sun because it’s just nice, and Adam buys Ronan ice cream, which he then says Ronan is never allowed to eat in public again because of public decency laws.

Finally, Ronan takes Adam to the Gap, because it’s the only store he knows of that sells preppy style clothes -- he’s not even sure if they’re quality clothes, it’s just the only store he knows off the top of his head that sells what he’s looking for -- and convinces Adam that he needs nice clothes for Stanford as well as fashionable rags for Stanford. 

“How much did you spend in that clothes store we just went to?” Adam demands.

“Less than half of what I spent at the tool store, and to be fair, a good chunk of that was on my new boots,” Ronan answers truthfully. Adam looks like he wants to be mistrustful, but can’t quite bring himself to question one of Ronan’s most basic tenets -- that he never lies -- and so Adam lets him lead him into the Gap, and Ronan corners a sales girl and asks her straight out if this is a good place to buy clothes to attend an Ivy League school in, and, in a whisper, she directs Ronan to the Dillard’s at the far end of the Mall, and he slips her fifty bucks, which she makes disappear with a startled look on her face. “Thanks for being honest,” he tells her, and she merely nods, looking stunned, and when Adam asks what that had been all about, Ronan tells him without editing the truth at all, including the fifty bucks, and Adam laughs and says he probably just doubled what she made all day in wages, which, Ronan says, makes him wish he’d given her a hundred.

Adam smiles at him, and says, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone how generous you are when nobody is looking.”

Ronan and Adam drive to the Dillard’s, because it really is way the fuck over at the other end of the outdoor mall, and Ronan doesn’t want to have to carry Adam’s new prep boy clothes all that far in the summer heat, even is if it’s cooler than it has been for the few days prior. It’s still not that cool.

The sales guy in the men’s department takes one look at their ratty jeans and Ronan’s tank top and Adam’s faded blue t-shirt that used to have a logo on it that Ronan can’t make out anymore, and decides that they aren’t worth his time. Ronan goes directly to the customer service desk and asks for a manager, while Adam flushes and tries to tell Ronan it isn’t worth it, but Ronan thinks it is. They get a prim, slim woman in a pencil thin skirt suit, and Ronan explains that his friend is going to Stanford in the fall, and needs a wardrobe upgrade, but that the salesman in the men’s department had demonstrated a marked lack of interest in helping them, and she leads them to the men’s department herself, brushing aside the salesman, “Keith,” according to his name badge, and tells him to go to the back and start helping to unbox stock. Then she asks Adam personal but pointed questions about what he’s worn in the past, what he is comfortable in, what kind of impression he is trying to make, and whether or not he wants to be fitted for a suit while they are there. Adam answers her questions as carefully as he can, and Ronan thinks he’s being honest, but he turns her down for a suit, saying that he’s got a friend who had a tailor that he’ll use to get a new suit when he needs one. She tells him to get one sooner, rather than later, if he intends to attend things like fundraising events and certain types of school functions, but she seems to approve of Adam not buying his suit off the rack, even if it means he won’t be buying his suit here.

Then she ushers Adam into a dressing room and begins passing him in clothes, having him come out and show her in between outfit changes, and Ronan is exhausted just watching them do it, but oddly, they both seem to be having a fairly good time, chatting about her son, who is at Yale, and will be coming home over Thanksgiving, but had stayed through the short summer semester to fit in some electives he hadn’t had time for during the rest of the year. She advises Adam never to wear pleated waisted pants, as they wrinkle and look sloppy after you’ve sat down in them, and dresses Adam mostly in worsted wool, with a couple of pair of chinos for less casual events, and brightly colored long sleeved button ups that she says set off his natural coloring in a very flattering way, along with some polo shirts, again, for those less formal events he might be attending. Adam seems to like her so much that he actually forgets to look at the prices on most of what she picks out for him, and when they’re done, he regards the mountain of clothes with something like dismay. 

“Ronan, I can’t let you…” he begins, and Ronan leans in close to whisper in his good ear.

“I can’t wait to see if I can get most of this off of you using nothing but my teeth, Parrish; go wait outside.”

Adam, looking dubious but flushes a little, thanks Evangeline effusively, and goes to wait outside while Ronan pulls out a credit card and isn’t that surprised to find that he’s paying almost a thousand dollars in Stanford style clothing for Adam. 

“Of course, I’ll be taking twenty percent off for the absolutely unacceptable behavior of Keith, and be sure that he and I will be having a long conversation about how he treats customers in my store,” Evangeline says, which knocks the price down to a little over eight hundred bucks, which doesn’t seem bad to Ronan at all. “He’s going on scholarship, isn’t he?” Evangeline asks in a low tone. “They come in not knowing what they need and not having the funds to buy more than a few things. It’s very kind of you to do this for your friend.”

“I’m in love with him,” Ronan says; it just sort of slips out of his mouth.

She smiles widely at him as she bags their purchases, and says, “Lucky him. Lucky you. I wish you both the best of luck.” Ronan tucks that receipt in his pocket as evidence to destroy later, and Dillard’s lets you keep their hangers, they have bags with holes in the tops that the hooked part of the hanger slides out of, so Ronan doesn’t have to worry about raiding any of the closets in his home looking for empty hangers. Ronan guesses that’s how you can tell if a store is really nice.

He walks outside with Adam’s Stanford wardrobe half draped over one arm, half hooked over one hand, and passes half of it off to Adam to carry.

“We can hang them in the back,” Ronan says. “There are hooks for hanging clothes back there. That way we don’t have to worry about wrinkling them.”

“Ronan,” Adam says in his ‘I’m about to object to this’ way.

“I’m starving. Why don’t you buy us lunch?” Ronan asks, and Adam closes his mouth, still looking uncertain, but with his chin cocked a little in determination, like he’s trying to convince himself that he deserves this.

They get the clothes hung up in the back seat. There are too many for the hooks, so some of them they just drape across the seat. Ronan checks the directory board for restaurants, and finds one sushi place that he’s heard is good, and at least three other places that sound like they’ll be good.

“How do you feel about raw fish?” Ronan asks Adam, who is also scanning the board. 

“Uncertain,” Adam says. “I’ve never had it. I’m more certain of a place with grilled cow.” He taps one of the little lavender buildings that indicate restaurants. “Giovanni’s Prime Cuts,” he says.

Ronan has never met a steak he didn’t like, so he agrees. “The next time, though, you have to promise to try the sushi,” he warns.

“So noted,” Adam says with a small smile. The restaurant is within walking distance, so they stroll down winding footpaths lined with benches and fountains and flowerbeds, the grass a green so blinding that Ronan bends over to run a hand through it to check and see if it’s real.

Giovanni’s turns out to be a fairly posh place, and Ronan is a little surprised not to be turned away at the hostess stand for their lack of jackets and ties, but the hostess just smiles and them and asks whether they’d like to sit inside or out on the terrace. 

“Inside,” Ronan says at once. “Air conditioning,” he insists to Adam.

“Whatever you want. This is your thank you lunch,” Adam says, and they are seated at a corner table, set for two, but big enough for four to eat off of. Tables for two are usually so small you can’t find a place to put down your drink, in Ronan’s experience.

In less than a minute, a waitress is passing them leather menus with gold embossed letters on the front, and asking if she can take their drink orders. Adam orders iced tea. Ronan orders a Roy Rogers, just to see if they know what one is.

Adam, who clearly doesn’t know what one is, says, “You’re going to get carded, and you’re supposed to be driving.”

“Relax, Parrish,” Ronan says. “It’s just a fancy name for a cherry coke, except they make it at the bar with grenadine and you usually get a cherry in it. My dad used to let us order them as kids, so that we could order drinks like the grown ups did. Of course, once coke actually started making cherry coke and you could just buy one, lots of places forgot how to even make them.”

“You’re going to judge this place on whether or not the bartender on duty knows how to make your obscure non-alcoholic beverage, aren’t you?” Adam asks, but he sounds amused rather than annoyed.

“Maybe just a little. I’ll save most of my judgement for whether or not they can make a good steak,” he says, and opens the menu. He actually settles on the prime rib, which the menu notes is a house specialty. It costs $34 dollars, and he hopes Adam’s head doesn’t explode when he gets the bill for this lunch, or dinner, as it’s about 2:30 pm, so it doesn’t really fit into either category.

Adam is apparently okay with the prices, as he orders a ten ounce tenderloin, which must cost close to as much as the prime rib, and the waitress bounces away with their orders, leaving their drinks behind. Ronan takes a long swallow of his, finds it a little too sweet for his adult taste buds, but not bad other than that. He offers Adam the cherry, and Adam flushes, though there is practically no one else in the restaurant, but he plucks it off the stem Ronan is holding with his teeth.

The steak comes with garlic broiled potatoes and a house vegetable. Ronan kind of expects something green and bland, but they serve up a squash medley which is actually pretty good, along with rolls and butter.

Adam eats his steak like he’s never going to get to have steak again, slowly and with obvious relish. The prime rib is maybe the best Ronan has ever had, so he doesn’t hurry either. He has to insist that Adam at least try the squash, which Adam claims he doesn’t like, and is pleased to be proven right in that not all squash is created equally, and Adam likes his enough to eat three quarters of his portion. He groans when he swallows the last bite of his steak, and says, “I’m so full I’m afraid to move.”

“Good thing I’m the one driving us home,” Ronan says, smirking a little. “Do you want to wait at the door and I can pick you up, so you don’t have to walk so far to the car.” He is at least half serious. The car is within walking distance, but it’s not exactly close, with the way the outdoor mall is laid out. At least they aren’t carrying anything this time.

“No, I think I can make it that far,” Adam says, his Henrietta accent sliding in around the edges. “I might end up asleep during the drive home, though.”

“That’s fair,” Ronan says, because Adam had let him spend a shitload of money on him today with barely any complaining at all, because he recognizes Ronan’s tendencies to do dangerous things left to his own devices, and hadn’t had much to offer as incentive to keep Ronan from doing them other than this shopping trip.

They could have stayed in bed all day, and that would have occupied Ronan fairly well, but he would have still been close enough to Cabeswater not to be able to really push it out of his mind, and from Richmond, at least, Cabeswater isn’t really within driving distance.

Ronan discreetly empties his pockets of the incriminating receipts as they exit the restaurant -- Adam leaves an outrageous tip, which pleases Ronan -- and they both yawn and stretch almost in the same moment, blinking a little against the bright afternoon sunlight after the dim interior of the restaurant.

Ronan considers trying to take Adam to a shoe store, but in the end, doesn’t quite dare push him any further than he’s already allowed himself to be pushed. The Aglionby dress shoes will do for his preppy wardrobe, at least for a while, and for the rest, Adam’s running shoes need replacing, but Ronan thinks he can dream those, and the work boots actually go pretty well with some of the grunge wear they got at The Buckle, which running shoes would not really work with, for the most part. He wonders what size Adam is. It’s not like Ronan doesn’t own at least a dozen pairs of shoes, most of which he hardly ever wears. It would be too easy if Adam was his size.

They meander their way back to the car slowly, in deference to their full stomachs, and it’s after four before they head back toward the Barns. It will be full dark before they get there. Ronan leaves the radio off, listening to the road noise and the rustle of Adam’s shopping bags in the back seat, just in case Adam does want to go to sleep, but Adam stays awake, and they talk about how their gardens will grow back into Cabeswater. The paths they made between them Adam thinks will stay, but some of the walls will have to be torn down. The wall around the Stand, for example, will have to come down, to let the power of the heartspring feed Cabeswater. Adam thinks that the gardens will still be there, will still be connected unless they deliberately try to disconnect any of them, because Cabeswater will reabsorb them, but will still have to deal with the paths they have walked and the places they had built. Some places will spread. The Copse, probably. The Hollow, maybe, depending on the reality in which that shale wall had existed, and even then, it had been growing southward as the stream flowed down from the waterfall. The Stand will almost surely grow once the wall is knocked down. It’s harder to tell about the other places. They had been more tied into a part or a piece of Cabeswater, and might stay mostly the same. Adam is less sure if any of them will move.

“The Clearing, according to your map, is kind of on the northeast top edge of the circle we made. Whenever we went to Cabeswater before, we almost always entered at that clearing, which was at the southern end of Cabeswater. And the Cave of Ravens was in the the Clearing as well. The spring was gone, and the Cave of Ravens was in its place. So I’m not sure how the geography of the place will work, or how it will change. But Cabeswater’s geography was never something you could have made a map from, so maybe it won’t matter. I’ll check it again tonight when we get home and see if it has… unpacked itself a little more,” Adam says.

“Maura told me that she knew we wouldn’t wait two days to go in, and to make sure to use the buddy system,” Ronan says, and the back of his neck flushes again at hearing the tone of her voice suggesting it in his memory. “I think the psychics know we’re together.”

“They do,” Adam says, almost absently. “Or they knew we were going to be, after the kiss that night. Calla told me that I didn’t know what I was doing, getting involved with you. That being involved with you was a permanent situation. I told her I knew that, and she made me a drink. Something with pineapple juice in it. I think she thought I was crazy, and that level of craziness deserved a drink. Maura said that Orla sulked for almost two full days. She has the hots for you.”

Ronan shudders a little at the idea of Orla having the hots for him. “I could have lived a long and happy life without ever knowing that,” Ronan tells Adam.

“If I have to know it, you have to know it,” Adam declares, which seems both reasonable and monstrously unfair to Ronan. They take the winding roads up to the Barns and onto the property, and Ronan parks without even squealing his tires, and then they have to carry all of Adam’s birthday presents into the house, though Adam says to just leave the tools in the trunk until tomorrow, since he’ll have to sort through them to pick what to take with him in his toolbox anyway. Most of the Stanford stuff doesn’t even come out of the bags, since it has to be hung anyway, and the bags are sort of attached to the hangers, but the stuff from the Buckle comes out of the bags and gets put away, and Adam is only a little outraged at the additional t-shirts Ronan had managed to sneak onto the counter, and declares the snake t-shirt his favorite.

“How much did all of this cost you, really?” Adam asks, looking like he’s bracing himself for the answer.

“The manager at Dillard’s gave us twenty percent off because her employee was a douchebag,” Ronan tries to redirect.

“That was nice of her. How much, Ronan?” Adam insists.

“I’m not telling you how much I spent on you for your birthday,” Ronan says. “It’s not polite to even ask.”

“The tools were the only things that were for my birthday,” Adam says.

“I never said that,” Ronan says. “I said that the tools were for you birthday, but not that they were the only things I was getting for your birthday. And you got off light. I almost made you go to a shoe store.”

Adam slumps down onto the couch.

“Hey,” Ronan says, and slumps down next to him. “Did you have fun today?”

Adam seems to think about that seriously for a long moment, and then, grudgingly, says, “Yes. I did. And it kept you out of Cabeswater while it was still in a state of disarray.”

“I didn’t earn this money, Parrish,” Ronan says. “I lucked into it. My father happened to have a marketable talent, though I’m damned if I know how he managed to market his talent. But the point is, the money doesn’t matter to me. We didn’t even put a dent in the interest I live on from what my father left me. I need you to be okay with that. I don’t need or want to do that every day, but if I’m out and I see something and it makes me think of you, I need you to be able to accept it as a gift because I like giving you gifts. I like that you’re going to be wearing stuff I paid for. I admit, it’s a little bit of a possessive thing, which I will do my best not to indulge, but this time, we needed to be away and we needed a reason to be away, and I have at least 19 years worth of birthdays to make up for, so you’re actually lucky I didn’t spend more. And I reserve the right to take you to a shoe store. I only didn’t because I was pretty sure you’d balk, and I figured we could at least see if we wore the same size first, since I own a least a dozen pairs of shoes I don’t wear.”

“Eleven,” Adam say.

Ronan brightens. “Then you can shop for shoes in my closet and get most of what you need,” he says. “The only time I can imagine spending this much money on you ever again is if you end up having a growth spurt within the next year or so, which I think is possible now that you’re not eating instant noodles all the time. Or if it’s our honeymoon or something, and by then, you’ll probably be making money of your own, and it will stop being my money and start being _our_ money.”

“Did you just ask me to marry you?” Adam asks.

Ronan replays what he’d just said, and sighs a little. “I assumed that if you wanted to be with me, that we’d eventually get married, but I don’t think either of us is in a hurry to do that. I’m happy either way. I don’t have much of a preference. If you want to get married, we can. If you want to live in sin, that’s more or less okay with me, too.”

Adam snorts. “Doesn’t the Catholic church count it as living in sin even if we do get married?” he asks.

“For now. But I have hopes for the future. And if it comes down to it, I can become an Episcopalian. It will never feel quite right to me, because I have always been Catholic, but nobody can tell me I wasn’t born this way, and if I was born this way, then God had his hand in my creation.” Ronan shakes his head. “Still not the point. The point is, this money doesn’t mean anything to me except for as a means to an end, and part of that end is to making you happy. I won’t do it all the time or even all that often. I mean, how often have you actually seen me shop, Parrish?”

“Really shop, you mean? Not counting groceries?” Adam asks.

“Yeah, I mean go out to buy stuff for myself,” Ronan says.

“I’ve never seen you shop,” Adam admits.

“If I need something, I go and get it, but I don’t usually need more than one or two things at a time. I don’t go on spending extravaganzas the way that Gansey might occasionally do when he gets frustrated. I’m just not that interested in stuff, or I’d have a mansion instead of a rambling big old farm house with mismatched kitchen appliances. Is any of this getting through to you?” Ronan asks, bordering on frustrated.

“It is,” Adam says gently. “I won’t hound you about how much you spent on me today. I’ll just tell you thank you for my birthday gifts, and assume that this kind of binge shopping is an aberration.” 

“It is an aberration,” Ronan says. “But I still kind of had fun. It was nice of you to let me buy you things just because I missed your birthday and I wanted to buy you things. And it’s all mostly practical stuff, Adam. Stuff you’re going to need. So don’t worry about it. Living here costs next to nothing because of the way my dad set up the trust for the maintenance of the place. I get to pay myself a salary for upkeep. I don’t actually do it, there’s no real need, but I could if I wanted to, and it would come from the estate, not out of my personal pocket. All the bills are paid for by the trust he put the estate in. And he left the estate to me, so there isn’t dick Declan can do about it.” He grins, all flash and satisfaction. “When Matthew is old enough, I’ll probably divide the estate up so that he has equal access to it in case anything happens to me. If, you know, I find some way to keep him… to keep him awake.”

“We’ll find something,” Adam says, and slides a hand around the back of Ronan’s neck. “We’ll figure something out.”

“There’s got to be a way,” Ronan says, clenching his fists tightly for a moment. “I just haven’t thought of it yet.”

“I’ll work on it. We can see what we can find out from the ladies at Fox Way, if you don’t mind that they know. Gansey may know something about it, the way that he holds some part of Cabeswater in him. You know how he is, now. The same, but different. Like Gansey to the tenth power,” Adam says.

Ronan considers all of that, and then just nods tiredly. “I don’t know that I’m getting anywhere working on it on my own. I don’t know if Opal depends on me being alive and well to be awake or not. I’m not sure if I created her. She was always in my dreams, for as long as I can remember. But if she didn’t die with Cabeswater, she must be getting power from someplace.” Ronan rubs his face. “I’m not used to having to be careful for myself because of people depending on me. I’ll have to work on it.”

“I’m not one of your dreams, but you could work on it for me, too,” Adam says. “If anything happened to you, I won’t go to sleep, but I might wish that I could.”

“I’ll work on it,” Ronan says gruffly, and kisses Adam carefully, to show that he means it.

\--

They wake up tangled in Ronan’s sheets, with Ronan holding handfuls of what look a lot like diamonds to his admittedly untutored eye. Uncut diamonds, and he isn’t sure what to do with them. He remembers scooping them up thinking they were gravel at the bottom of a stream bed that just happened to sparkle entrancingly in the sun. He’d meant to give them to Adam, but Adam is looking at Ronan’s handfuls of diamonds, his hands still wet from the water in the stream, with alarm.

“They were lying on the bottom of a stream bed,” Ronan tries to explain. “I just thought they were pretty reflective rocks.”

Adam ducks his head to look at them more closely, and says, “No, Ronan, I’m pretty sure you’ve got a double handful of uncut diamonds there.” His voice is almost neutral as he says it. “I don’t even know what you’d have to do to get dream diamonds certified and registered and cut. Maybe claim that you found them in the house when you were unpacking some of your father’s things. Although that might not be good either. That might bring the police out to take a look around the place.”

“Declan will know what to do with them,” Ronan says, hearing his voice come out a little flat, but certain. “I’m pretty sure he did things with my dad, on the business end of whoever you sell dream things to.”

“Can’t we just put them away somewhere?” Adam asks, as if the whole situation makes his brain hurt.

“Yes,” Ronan says. “I don’t need them for anything. I can just put them away somewhere. They were meant for you, anyway. I just thought they were pretty, and you’d like them.” He can hear the faint note of misery in his own voice, and almost flinches when Adam slides his arms around him.

“Oh, Ronan,” he says, and then laughs. “Trust you to bring something valuable but dangerous out of a dream because you thought they were pretty.” But he sounds genuinely amused, and his arms are comforting around Ronan’s naked chest. “Here,” Adam says, and cups his hands, and Ronan pours the pile of sparkling uncut stones into his hands. Adam gets out of bed and takes them to Ronan’s dresser, opens a case meant for tie bars that he’s never used, takes out the backing of it, and dumps the diamonds into it. “We’ll mail them to a charity,” he says finally. “They’ll still get investigated, because random diamonds, but they won’t be linked to us that way. Think of a charity you want to give several million dollars in anonymous diamonds to. Make sure it’s a big enough charity to retain lawyers so that it can defend itself from any kind of law enforcement that wants to make the diamonds just disappear or keep them in holding pretty much forever. What do you think about the ACLU?”

“They were supposed to be for you. We can send them to any charity you want to send them to,” Ronan says. “I’m sorry.”

Adam laughs again, and sinks down on the side of the bed, and rubs his hand over Ronan’s buzzed hair. “Don’t worry about it. Nobody is going to find them in there for a while, and we’ll think of a way to send them so anonymously that nobody will ever be able to trace them back to us. Let it go. Let’s get some showers and breakfast, and then I’ll see if I can do a reading to see what’s going on with Cabeswater. Though I think if you can pull diamonds out of your dream without bringing out anything extra this time, things have probably settled down some.”

Ronan makes eggs, sausage, hashbrowns from real potatoes, and toast for breakfast while Adam sits on the living room floor and lays out his tarot cards in a pattern that Ronan doesn’t ever remember seeing him use before.

As if Adam can hear him thinking it, he says, “This pattern was meant to divine the future safety of yourself or your family. It’s not used that frequently, but I found it in one of Persephone’s books.” He hesitates. “Maura and Calla gave me a lot of them. I think partly because they thought I needed them and partly because it hurt them to see them.”

“And probably also because they thought Persephone would have wanted you to have them,” Ronan adds. “I mean, they knew her pretty well, and if I had to say you were like any of the ladies at Fox Way, I would have said you were most like Persephone. Quiet, and with a different way of looking at the world than most people. A different way of looking at other people than most people.” Ronan shakes his head. “I’m not sure what I mean to say. You see _into_ people in a way that other people don’t. Maybe that’s a little better.”

Adam looks a little pleased as he looks over his shoulder at Ronan, and then turns back to his tarot spread. “It looks like there are still dangerous spots, but we knew that about Cabeswater already. But the reading is actually mostly peaceful, the overall spread showing security.”

“Your breakfast is going to get cold, Parrish,” Ronan hints broadly, and Adam gets up and leaves his card in their current pattern, and joins Ronan at the kitchen table. They eat, and Adam has a second helping of hashbrowns -- “Teach me to cook these,” he demands, and Ronan says, “They’re easy, I’ll do it tomorrow.” -- and drinks two glasses of orange juice, and his hair is a rumpled mess, and Ronan is absolutely crazy about him.

After breakfast, Ronan goes down into the basement to put the bed linens they had put in the washer yesterday morning in the dryer, hoping it’s okay that they sat overnight, but they don’t smell funny or anything, and then takes a shower and puts on freshly laundered jeans and a white tank top. He tries on his new boots, and while he’s pretty sure he’s going to be doing a lot of walking today, and new boots aren’t the best thing to do a lot of walking in, they have to get broken in somehow, so what the hell.

After Adam gets out of the shower, Ronan calls him into his bedroom to take his pick of his shoes -- at least six pair are still in the boxes they’d come in -- and Adam picks a new pair of jogging shoes that are still in the box, a pair of brown loafers that are definitely still in the box, and a pair of boots with zippers on them that Ronan had worn a few times before deciding that the jingling of the zippers bugged him. They don’t actually move them anywhere, since Ronan’s closet is now also Adam’s closet, but they at least take the ones he’d chosen out of their boxes. Ronan dresses Adam in the jeans _he’d_ picked out at the Buckle, and the snake t-shirt.

“Marking your territory much?” Adam asks, amused, but he just leans down to kiss Ronan while Ronan tries to figure out a way to defend himself. Then he just gives in and admits that he had been marking his territory, and follows Adam back downstairs, prepared to ask for forgiveness if necessary, but Adam only laughs at him when Ronan asks if he needs to apologize for dressing Adam like a doll. “I like that you want me in clothes that you like to look at me in,” Adam says with a little shrug. “Maybe that means we’re both a little on the fucked up side, but if it works for us, why worry about it?”

Adam calls Maura or Calla to get their opinion on whether or not it’s safe to go into Cabeswater yet, and must get Maura, because Ronan can’t hear the other side of the conversation. “Yeah, no, I let him take me to Richmond and buy me lots of stuff for my birthday, so we were far away and distracted enough that we couldn’t just drive down the road a piece and be right there. Tools and some clothes for Stanford. Way too much, but I don’t know exactly. He wouldn’t tell me. No, I… I think it made him happy that I let him do it. Dreaming the stuff wouldn’t have been the same. Besides, he’s a lot more careful about what kinds of things he dreams now that he’s aware of how it affects the ley line. _Gansey_ is having prophetic dreams?” That question is strident enough to catch Ronan’s attention. “Oh. So you mean the part of him that is Cabeswater is just remembering forward in time? Or in a loop of time? Did you tell Blue? We’ll have to keep an eye on him. It didn’t occur to me that bringing back Cabeswater would do anything to Gansey. Well, at least it’s not disruptive, if he’s just dreaming them. He could be going into trance like states or something equally debilitating. Yeah, actually,” Adam says. “Diamonds. I don’t think he realized what they were. He just thought they were pretty and wanted to give them to me. Calla, huh. Well, God knows we owe your family more than we can ever repay. Don’t be ridiculous, of course you’d keep them. Give the phone to Calla.” Pause. “If you can get rid of a few million in dream diamonds, the profits are yours to keep as long as you can get Maura to go along with it. Yeah, we’ll bring them over today. We were just going to try to figure out a way to mail them anonymously to a charity, but we like you guys better than any charity. Yes, clothes shopping. I’m wearing a shirt with a snake on it right now.”

Ronan hears Calla’s delighted cackle over the other end of the line.

“I know. I told you, permanent is not a problem for me. We’ll work out the future when the future gets here. We know where to come if we need to know about the future. Okay, tell Maura I said ‘bye.” Adam disconnects the call. “Calla scried you dreaming. She says she either gets nothing at all from Cabeswater, or channels that you never see on basic cable. Do you care if we give her the diamonds?”

“If she thinks she can get rid of them without getting Blue’s mother arrested, then I’m all for it. If anyone deserves some dream diamonds to facilitate a better lifestyle, it’s the ladies at Fox Way. And Blue will be able to have her choice of colleges. I know she wasn’t too keen on community college.” Ronan shrugs. “Let’s take them over now. The sooner they’re gone, the happier I’m going to be.”

“Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that Calla will be able to… is the word fence? I don’t even know for sure that’s what she’s going to do with them, but, whatever. Calla knowing what to do with diamonds that you pulled out of a dream with you just somehow doesn’t surprise me,” Adam says. He goes upstairs to get the tie bar box.

They try to feed them at Fox Way, and Ronan is a little surprised and a lot pleased that they’re surprised that he can cook. He gives them a sharp ‘You don’t know everything about me’ smile. Calla gives him an eyebrow that says ‘I know enough.’

Calla accepts the box of diamonds like it’s a white elephant gift at a Christmas Party, and gives them in exchange a pair of gold Roman coins on chains long enough to slip over their heads. “They’re a matched set,” she tells them, and at their blank looks, adds, “So you can’t lose each other in half-mythical dream forests. They have other uses, too. You can drop them into a scrying bowl and scry the past sometimes. Also, they’re fashionable. You should wear them all the time so they attune themselves to you and to each other.” She raises both eyebrows at them this time. “All. The. Time.” 

Adam flushes, but Ronan just smirks.

Calla weighs the tie bar box in her hand thoughtfully. “Feels like around eight million. I can probably get five or six, the fast and dirty way.” She grins nastily. “I hope you weren’t expecting a thank you. The medalia are your thank you. Remember. All the time.”

Maura appears, takes in the necklaces, and then picks each one up by the chain, being careful not to touch the coins, and drops them inside their collars so that they are resting on bare skin. “Calla told you to wear them all the time?” she asks. “Touching your skin is best, and you may notice that they feel warm sometimes. If one of them seems to be trying to get your attention, it probably means the other one of you needs you for something. They’ll be a bit glitchy at first. Your relationship is so new that you’ll feel like you need each other a lot of the time. That will settle over time.”

“If you sold these, you could probably make a fortune,” Ronan says. 

“Getting ahold of the right kind of coin and then to be able to afford to buy them is painstaking work. And then setting them in the right alloy of silver and gold takes weeks. And if the pair of people we give them to aren’t… well, if the emotion isn’t real, they don’t work. Gansey and Blue have a set. This is only the second set we’ve ever made. Persephone started them. I knew she meant one of them for Adam, but at the time I sort of thought she meant the other one for Blue.” She widens her eyes a little. “It’s these little surprises that make life worth living.” Then she smiles at them. “Be careful today. Cabeswater is a lot more settled than it was yesterday, but it may still be a little difficult to navigate. Part of the reason for the medalia. We’re awfully fond of you both.”

“No, we aren’t,” Calla says from somewhere further back in the house.

“Anyway, we don’t want to lose you. Wear them against your skin, wear them all the time, don’t be too surprised if they get warm pretty often for the first…” She looks at them, as though measuring. “Four or five years. After that, it may mean that one of you actually needs the other, but before that, with Adam going to Stanford. Well. Certain kinds of longing can feel a lot like need.”

“Thank you,” Adam says, and lets Maura lead them to the door.

“Calla really is fond of you both,” she murmurs. “She just doesn’t like it that she is.” She herds them outside, and they are standing on the porch, the door closed behind them.

“Was that supposed to make us feel better?” Ronan asks, and Adam laughs, trying to muffle it with his hands. 

“Let’s get out of here. I want to see Cabeswater again. I can already feel it, as close as a thought. It’s waiting for us,” Adam says finally, when he gets his laughter under control.

“How does that work? Do you feel what Cabeswater feels?” Ronan asks.

“In a sense,” Adam says, and climbs into the BMW. “It’s more like I sense its state of being. I’ll have to work on any little fractures that have crept up onto the ley line before I leave, and probably on every break, for at least a little while. I can feel the ley line without Cabeswater, but I can’t always feel if there is a problem with it. It’s Cabeswater that always guided me toward where to go to fix the line. I hadn’t figured out a way to directly tap into the line to figure out how to maintain it yet. It was one of the things I was trying to do at Fox Way when you kidnapped me to come and live with you and forced me to focus all my attention on your magical forest.”

“Yeah, that’s the way I remember it,” Ronan says with just a hint of a sneer. “Clearly that makes you the princess in this fairy tale, Parrish.”

“I can’t be both the princess and the Magician,” Adam says. “You’re going to have to pick one.”

“I’m not really into girls. Especially cartoon girls,” Ronan says, dry as a bone.

Adam lets out that laugh that Ronan loves, the one that sounds like it’s as much a surprise to him as it is to everyone around him. He smiles as he drives the still familiar route to the field where they had always once parked to go into Cabeswater, and doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath until he sees the line of trees there, dense and deeply green and waiting for them, like it had never been gone at all.

They climb out of the car, and without speaking, link hands. The medalia on Ronan’s chest seems to grow warm, but he might be imagining it.

There is no stream to follow into the woods this time, no path that they can see, but they walk along the edge of the treeline anyway for a while, and eventually come to a grass covered hill of rich, dark soil with a ring of bayberry bushes at the top surrounding a massive beech tree. 

Aurora is waiting for them at the top of the hill, smiling at them incandescently. For a moment, Ronan almost sees what Adam says he sees when he looks at her, a girl made from stardust, but it’s over in an instant and then he isn’t sure he’d seen it at all. “Almost all of us survived the unmaking,” she tells them. “Only the youngest of us weren’t strong enough to reincarnate on this spirit path, and they may come later, if the path grows stronger. All your paths are still here, all your gardens, though Cabeswater has taken down most of your walls. It has left a few that were crafted with particular beauty and one that was made with particular power, but it is all of one piece, and needs access to all of its places of power.”

“Cabeswater needs to do whatever is best for it,” Adam says. “The paths were only meant for the rebuilding of the forest, because we’re only human, and we connect places in our minds with paths that run between them.”

“You can always enter on my hill, but Cabeswater will let you cross any boundary, as the Greywaren and the Magician. If there is no path where you wish to enter, you have only to step inside and it will make a path for you, for the two of you. Others may have a more difficult time finding their way into the boundaries of the forest. Not Gansey. He is of Cabeswater. And the trees remember the psychic’s daughter, and will welcome her as well.”

“How do you know…” Ronan begins to ask, and she laughs at him, high and tinkling, like the ringing of silvery bells.

“The tree-lights talk to Cabeswater in the ancient language of trees. The whole forest knows your story.” She gives them an odd little curtsey and Ronan notices she’s dressed in a gown of ivy and moss that looks like it would be silken to the touch. “I am only here to guide you inside, in case you didn’t think to try to create your own path. The forest awaits your coming.” She steps aside, gesturing down into the luxuriant dark growth of the trees, and Ronan feels the moment that he crosses the real boundary into Cabeswater. The air is cool and smells of earth and green, growing things, and the trees whisper, _Salve retro, Greywaren, magi, qui reformatur, est nobis._ ‘Welcome back, Greywaren, Magician, you who remade us.’

“Gratias tibi,” Ronan says. “Nos Cabeswater periit.” ‘We have missed Cabeswater.’

_Gratias tibi, gratias tibi, gratias tibi,_ the trees whisper their thanks from every direction, some barely whispers, other great susurrations of sound.

_Multitudinem hortorum vestrorum et nos dimisimus omnia, fons tantum moventis salicum nemus ut facilius accedere._ ‘We have left all your gardens, only moving the wellspring of the willow grove so that it may be easier to access.’

“Gratias tibi,” Ronan says again, wondering if they mean that they’ve moved it off the ledge our out of the grotto or what, but deciding that he’s okay with finding out on his own, once they walk the paths of their gardens. “Doleo super murum putei ponerent. Necesse erat praesidio.” ‘I’m sorry about the wall around the well. It was necessary to protect it.’

_Quae in hortis meminit, Cabeswater meminit._ ‘What the gardens remember, Cabeswater remembers.’

The trees around them are immense, their roots gnarled in a tangle only partially buried in the soil. The light slants in golden rays filled with dust motes the way it really only does in an old forest like this. Ronan fills his lungs with the air of a forest he thought he’d only ever see in his memories, and feels like they have done a good thing. Right or wrong, the world needs magic, Adam had said, and Ronan believes it.

_Quid putatis, Greywaren saltus destruere nequit. Debet defieri vobis spiritus et murum._ ‘What you dream, Greywaren, the forest cannot destroy. The wall around the spirit well must be unmade by you.’

“The wall around the Stand,” Adam says. “You dreamed it here, in the gardens, and so also in Cabeswater. The only other wall you dreamed that way was around the Dreaming Ring, and you knocked it down before we woke up from moving it.”

Ronan doesn’t hesitate to lie down on the forest floor, soft with fallen leaves and moss, and he knows that dreaming in a place like Cabeswater could be dangerous, but he trusts that this time it won’t be, when he’s undoing what he did to protect the well.

He closes his eyes and inhales the familiar scent of Cabeswater, and feels his mind drawn to the thing he had dreamed most powerfully, the wall around the well, he can sense the power of the well trapped within it, and he unmakes the wall, leaving not a single stone of it, and feels the power within it burst free, and it feels like that power touches every part of Cabeswater to his sleeping mind, and he checks and makes certain there is nothing else he had dreamt while he had been in the gardens, knows that only the things he had dreamt while in the gardens, while he had essentially been a part of Cabeswater, are the only things that Cabeswater itself cannot undo on its own, but there is nothing else. He lets his mind wander quickly through their gardens, sees that the fence that looks like it had been carved by woodland sprites has been left in place, and is pleased by this, and the gardens are much as they had made them, except, yes, Cabeswater has widened the path into the grotto with the willow Grove in it into almost a ramp to get down into it, and it’s funny, because it’s so much more than they needed, but it’s also not funny, because the forest clearly remembers Adam’s fear, and had gone to some trouble to ease the fear of its Magician. 

His eyes flutter as he wakes, and there are flower petals raining down on his face.

_Gratias tibi, Greywaren,_ the trees murmur.

“Vos es exspectata. Lorem venire ad locum istum.” Ronan says. ‘You’re welcome. Thank you for coming back to this place.’

_Hoc quondam in hac via spiritus et semper erit domus saltus._ ‘This place on this spirit path was once and always will be the home of the forest.’

“Potest te ostendunt me in spiritu in via, qua debet tendere?” Adam asks. ‘Can you show me the places where the spirit path needs tending?’

_In tempore._ ‘In time.’

“I forgot how frustrating it can be to talk to trees,” Adam murmurs from beside him, and Ronan chuckles.

“They definitely take the long view,” Ronan agrees. “Want to walk the gardens? See what Cabeswater has changed?”

_Bonus hortorum loca aequa via Spiritus. Quam irritum facit ad parietes et relinquentes crescendi volebant._ ‘Your gardens are good places, balanced on the spirit path. Other than to unmake some walls, we left them to grow as they would.’

“Well, that pretty much answers that question,” Adam says. “And proves that Cabeswater mostly understands English.”

_It is a messy-artless-disarrayed language,_ the trees say, somehow layering artless, messy, and disarrayed so that they come out all on top of one another. _Latin is more sensible._

“Et nos Latine loqui,” Ronan says. ‘Then we will speak Latin.’

He takes Adam’s hand. “Let’s go and see what’s new and what’s old. Let’s spend the whole day in Cabeswater. Let’s see if we can find the Dell and use the stone table.”

“Ronan!” Adam says, shocked, his cheeks going pink.

Ronan laughs, wild and open mouthed, as though letting something out that he had been holding back inside himself for years. 

“We can do anything, Adam. We are the kings of Virginia. You are the Magician and I am the Greywaren, and together, we can do anything.”

The medalia on his chest grows warm, and he leans in and kisses Adam, feeling his need, and they don’t make it to the stone table, but rather to a soft patch of moss that seems to grow up beneath them, while the trees whisper, _Magus, Greywaren, te vivificabis nos et potentia._

‘Your power together will enliven us.’

And with Adam pressed against him in the soft moss, that is enough for Ronan.


End file.
